Taraba Govt secures 200 solar-powered refrigerators for vaccine preservation

The Taraba Government says it has secured 200 solar-powered refrigerators for vaccine preservation in the 16 local government areas of the state.

Alhaji Aminu Hassan, Executive Secretary, Taraba Primary Health Care Development Agency, disclosed this when he received Mr Bhanu Pathak, Chief of Field, UNICEF Bauchi, on Thursday in Jalingo.

Pathak was on a monitoring and evaluation visit to the state under UNICEF zone. The other two states in the zone are Adamawa and Gombe.

Hassan said out of the 200 refrigerators, 118 of them had been received and installed while 82 of the refrigerators were being expected.

He said that the project was funded by a grant from Global Alliance for Vaccine Initiative (GAVI), an international organisation created in 2000 to improve access to new and underused vaccines for children living in the world’s poorest countries.

He said the intervention had tremendously improved service delivery, especially in immunisation activities in rural areas.

The executive secretary expressed appreciation to UNICEF for spending over N308 million on equipment, technical support and capacity building in Taraba within the last three years.

“The agency in line with the mandate of providing integrated primary healthcare service delivery has benefited through UNICEF support in the form of cash, technical support and capacity building to the tune of over N308 million in the last three years,” he said.

He stressed that the donor agencies had tremendously improved healthcare services in the rural areas of the state, particularly the Nigeria State Health Investment Project (NSHIP), the GAVI and the Basic Healthcare Provision Fund.

He added that the agency had embarked on a campaign to sensitise citizens on the importance of exclusive breastfeeding, routine immunisation and child spacing to have a healthy population.

Earlier, Pathak said that his team was in the state to monitor and evaluate activities in their various interventions there.

“The visit is the resumption of our regular monitoring visits which because of COVID-19 were not undertaken in the past five months.

“It is to update our technical capacity issues, and also to look at the situation in the field.

“We are very happy with the work being done by the Taraba Primary Health Care Development Agency and all the primary health care facilities.

“We also visited the medical stores and intend to intervene in order to ensure the safety and potency of all drugs kept thereby improving the environment,”