Operation Protect Your Borders is a community-led health security initiative aimed at strengthening immunization coverage and disease surveillance across Nigeria's border communities in Katsina and Zamfara States. Implemented in partnership with Solina Centre for International Development and Research, state governments, and local Civil Society Organizations, it represents one of the most comprehensive efforts to address vaccine-preventable diseases in the Lake Chad Basin's most vulnerable and hard-to-reach populations.
Isuna Technologies served as the implementing partner, deploying the Community Reorientation Women Network (CRoWN), a system of 1,975 indigenous women volunteers who conduct door-to-door household visits, counsel families on immunization and child health, and link zero-dose and under-vaccinated children to health facilities. The team built a structured referral and tracking infrastructure, including standardized facility registers and token-based verification systems, enabling real-time monitoring of referrals from community identification to service delivery.
The program reached 975 settlements across 25 border wards, engaging 97,763 households and registering 54,879 women of childbearing age. Comprehensive enumeration captured immunization status, nutritional indicators, and maternal health needs, allowing health authorities to identify and respond to critical immunity gaps. Early results revealed over 4,000 zero-dose children across both states, with particularly severe retention challenges in Zamfara's Mashema and Kwashabawa wards, where thousands of children had started but dropped out of vaccination schedules.
CRoWN volunteers achieved a 96% referral conversion rate for malnutrition treatment and 76% for zero-dose initiation, demonstrating exceptional community trust. During campaign support activities, volunteers contributed to vaccinating 56,240 children and resolved 93% of non-compliance cases through respectful dialogue and traditional leader mediation. The initiative also established community-based surveillance pathways for Acute Flaccid Paralysis and other vaccine-preventable diseases, directly linked to State Emergency Operations Centres.
Isuna's community-centered infrastructure integrated 135 health facilities, strengthened coordination between communities and the health system, and achieved 96% volunteer retention—proof of genuine community ownership. By empowering local women as trusted health navigators, Operation Protect Your Borders is helping to reshape how immunization demand generation and disease surveillance function in Nigeria's most challenging contexts—advancing Isuna's mission to deliver sustainable, people-powered solutions that strengthen health systems and protect vulnerable populations.
