Female Afghan activists risk lives for ‘children who have suffered a lot’

About three months ago, Ahmad Zia’s family noticed that the two-year-old was unable to move his legs.

Despite their concern, they were unable to take him to a doctor because of the fighting between Taliban militants and government forces in their district of Arghandab, in the southern Afghan province of Kandahar.

“For days on end there would be heavy fighting taking place here,” Ahmad Gul, an uncle, said.

“There were regular bombings, air strikes, gunfire . and anything else you can name. The situation was very tense.

“The clinics in the district were also closed due to the fighting.”

When they finally managed to take the child to the Mirwais Hospital in Kandahar city, doctors told them the child had contracted polio, a disease that has been eradicated from most countries.

Mr Gul said his little nephew was not vaccinated because they did not have access to doctors or clinics in Arghandab.

“And the vaccination team couldn’t get to us because of the security situation. Now our kid is affected for no fault of his,” Mr Gul said.

After years of progress in tackling the spread of polio, Afghanistan reported a drastic surge in cases in the past two years, corresponding with the rise in violence and the global pandemic, both of which affected immunisation efforts.

Now that fighting has subsided after the Taliban seized power in August, the World Health Organisation and UN children’s fund Unicef are hopeful of extending polio immunisation efforts to areas that were previously unreachable.

UN agencies announced on Monday that the Taliban had agreed to allow door-to-door visits by vaccination workers from next month.

The move was welcomed by the international community and healthcare experts.

“This is a unique opportunity. As you know, for threeand-a-half years the Taliban had banned house-to-house vaccination in areas that they control in Afghanistan,” said Dr Hamid Jafari, the WHO’s director of polio eradication in the region.

In the past, Taliban fighters, suspicious of healthcare workers – who they see as employees of foreign agencies working against them – not only attacked polio teams but also restricted access to areas under their control.

The number of polio cases rose from 19 in 2019 to 56 last year. So far this year, 44 polio cases have been detected.

Dr Jafari said that despite the increase, the level of transmission has been at the “lowest level” recorded in years.

“If we don’t resume vaccination now, I don’t know when such an opportunity will come again.”

However, fighting between the Taliban and former Afghan government was not the only security challenge the immunisation programme faced.

The local branch of ISIS has targeted female polio workers who make up most of the workers delivering vaccines.

A female polio worker in Nangarhar province said the campaign was suspended after some of her colleagues were killed this year.

“Many women workers left as there was no security for the campaign,” Munira, the activist who gave only one name, told The National.

Three women volunteers were killed by ISIS in the eastern province’s capital, Jalalabad, in March, bringing the vaccination campaign to a halt. In June, five more people died in another attack on a polio team in the city. Munira said the attacks on women volunteers had set the eradication effort back by years in the eastern provinces.

She said women were crucial to running the campaign.

“They [women] have access to communities and inside family homes even in the most conservative parts, where men would not be welcome due to the culture of gender segregation.”

Munira said women were also in a better position to combat the vaccine hesitancy than men because they had access to the children’s mothers.

Acknowledging their role, the Taliban are now encouraging the inclusion of women in the coming campaign and offered them security.

But this might not be enough to convince volunteers to return, Munira said.

“There are still many problems,” she said.

“We can’t ignore the security threat we still face from ISIS.

“Right now, even if the nationwide campaign resumes, there might be risk to the people conducting the campaign and volunteers might not even participate because we have been attacked twice and we lost colleagues.

“I am here and I know many other women who have also returned to work, even though we haven’t been paid in seven months.

“We are doing this because we want to help the children of this country who have suffered a lot.

“But many others may not want to return.”

Attacks on woman volunteers have set the polio eradication effort back by years in the eastern provinces