The Realities of a Post-COVID-19 World: What Sydani is Doing to Make Nigeria Safer for Everyone
Even against a backdrop of great uncertainty, our work at Sydani Group continues to position us as active allies of the national effort to push back the advance of the COVID-19 virus, drive vaccine uptake, and reach herd immunity as fast as possible.
In the last 9 months, we have led major efforts to ramp up COVID-19 vaccination across the nation, and it has been a mix of creative demand generation, optimization of service delivery, hands-on data management, strong performance management, and a revolutionary financial management system that has produced amazing results.
The drive of our technical guidance to both the national government and sub-national governments across the nation has consistently been focused on strategy development, vaccine distribution, and program implementation. The overarching influence of our interventions across the country has not only attracted foreign attention but has also made sure that learnings from our strategy would become the building blocks of the current national SCALES 3.0 strategy and implementation of vaccination activities across the country.
Our team has collaborated actively with international donors such as Gavi – the vaccine alliance, the United States Centre for Disease Control and Prevention (US CDC), and the Integrated Health Project (IHP) of the United States Agency for International Development (USAID). We have also provided high-level technical support to the National Primary Health Care Agency on Strategy development, Finance and Budgets, and Crisis Communications.
Testimonials from Osun state, the Land of the Living Spring
Over 16 states have directly benefited from our interventions across the nation and most of these states have become glowing examples of unprecedented accomplishments. One of such leading states in the country is Osun state. They have moved up the national ranking from 9th position to 3rd position and are gradually closing in on the leading two states.
It would suffice to state that the critical path for the project implementation in Osun was two-pronged:
- Provide technical assistance to the Osun State Primary Healthcare Development Board (OSPHCDB) to optimize vaccine logistics and supply chain models, deploy creative demand-generation activities and design a hands-on data management system for optimal performance; and,
- Provide financial support to strengthen and optimize the payments and accountability systems.
It’s important to note that the aim here was not to supersede the coordination, supervision, and monitoring mechanisms already established by the Osun State Primary Healthcare Development Board (OSPHCDB) and other partners, but to complement, support, and harmonize these mechanisms to achieve the core project objectives.
Expectedly, our work in Osun state not only moved them rapidly from just 25% COVID-19 coverage in April 2022 to over 96% in less than 5 months but also addressed vaccine hesitancy creatively.
One of the strategic ways by which Sydani’s support has impacted hesitancy was the launch and deployment of the Expanded Social Listening Project funded by the US CDC which became a veritable platform to monitor social media impressions and conversations centered around the COVID-19 vaccine and draw inferences from them. The insights generated from this foray have been very instrumental in designing demand-generation strategies tailor-made for the various states and regions of the country.
As it stands, the national effort tagged the SCALES 3.0 strategy, largely driven using mobile/outreach vaccination teams, revamped payment modality, hands-on data management, and decentralized communication was the brainchild of the strategies deployed in Osun by Sydani. In comparison to the first 4 states at the commencement of its rollout, more than 10 states have now exceeded the 50% immunization target across the nation, demonstrating the broad impact of this adaption.
In the meantime, our efforts across all 9 states that we directly support have produced over 3,894,702 vaccinations and still counting. Interestingly, this great feat has contributed about 10% to the total vaccinations (40%) done in the country since the inception of the COVID-19 vaccination exercise in 2021.
The COVID-19 pandemic no doubt shook the world. However, we remain entirely committed to the ideal and driving force that pushes for national herd immunity to curb the spread of the virus. We pledge to continue to do our best to support the government to ensure that Nigeria and Africa become less susceptible to any subsequent outbreak of the virus or any other virus at that.
Whilst doing this, we will also continue to provide the much-needed technical assistance to strengthen the public/primary health systems in the nation and at the same time build the capacities of healthcare workers and administrators to better perform their duties.
We will continue to provide thought partnership and strategic consulting services to our ever-growing wide range of clients including national and sub-national governments across Africa, public sector and private sector institutions, development partners, and multi-lateral and bi-lateral donors to deliver on their organizational objectives and mandates to make our world a better place.
