Three Reasons to Celebrate Women Working to End Polio, This Mother's Day

"I feel more confident than ever that the empowered and enlightened mothers of our time will continue to be the change agents in our societies with continued resilience in initiatives such as vaccination, family planning and basic education."

Speaking from his own experience in India, in this blog entry, Dr. Ananda Bandyopadhyay provides 3 examples to illustrate the ways in which women around the world have been at the forefront of the battle against polio in protecting the future of their children and their community:

1. Walking miles to vaccinate a child: Mothers from millions of households across the globe have taken their children to vaccination centres or vaccination booths, time and again, which often means loss of daily wages, traveling for long distances, and, at times, going against the wishes of the "head" of the family and traditions that did not allow women to step out of the confines of their homes.
2. Working to protect the community: "Involvement of female vaccinators from the local communities has been a hugely successful intervention in the eradication program, and has led to markedly better quality of vaccination campaigns. Their courage in facing the adversities, both natural (flood, inclement weather, inaccessibility) and man-made (insecurity, political instabilities); and their dedication in walking bare footed for miles with a vaccine carrier on their back to reach the hardest to reach areas, have contributed to ending polio in India and on the verge of being eradicated from all corners of the earth." The image above illustrates women's role in sharing knowledge; it is of a vaccinator training other vaccinators and medical officers at an open-air training session, Madhubani, Bihar, India.
3. Fostering the spirit of universal motherhood: The effort to eradicate polio has, for Dr. Bandyopadhyay, shown collective responsibility for protecting the community and understanding the shared risk of vulnerability to communicable diseases.