In March 2021 through the COVAX facility, Uganda received 864,000 doses of the Oxford/AstraZeneca COVID 19 vaccine. With limited vaccines available, high-risk population groups (health care workers, security personnel, teachers, persons aged 50 years and patients with chronic conditions) were prioritized for vaccination. However, uptake was still slow, a month after commencing COVID-19 vaccination.

With support from the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, IDI in collaboration with Uganda National Expanded Program on Immunisation (UNEPI) and other comprehensive HIV partners; Mildmay Uganda, Rakai Health Sciences Program, The AIDS Support Organisation, and Baylor Uganda moved to support the Government of Uganda’s efforts to roll out COVID-19 within the CDC-supported regions.

Efforts focused on:

  • Increasing uptake among priority groups
  • Strengthening vaccine pharmacovigilance
  • Improving data management and utilization of COVID-19 vaccination data

These efforts were further scaled to support Uganda’s efforts to reach over 21 million individuals through regional mass vaccination campaigns. The project further collaborated with Monitoring Evaluation and Technical Support Program (METS) to address accumulating vaccination data backlog.

Key Achievements

  • Developed a vaccination champion training toolkit that has been utilized to train over 6,000 vaccination champions
  • Rolled-out COVID-19 vaccination models to optimize targeting of priority populations. Through these models, IDI directly supported the vaccination of 75,098 individuals.
  • Supported 3 rounds of the COVID-19 regional accelerated mass vaccination campaigns in 51 districts and cities
  • 455 data entrants deployed increasing the proportion of vaccination data entered in the MoH electronic registry from 53% to 85% within 6 months.