Pakistan’s female vaccinators are doing more than helping end a disease

“They are supporting their education, they’re supporting their household, they’re supporting their men and giving a change in Pakistan,” says Sadia Shakeel, coordinator for a Rotary-supported polio resource center in Karachi. “This is bigger than polio.”
Shakeel calls them “little entrepreneurs.” Most of the women range in age from 21-38 and have their own children, she says. Yet they wake to say prayers before dawn, feed their children breakfast, and leave to start their work to end a disease.
Employing women is one key strategy of the Global Polio Eradication Initiative. And that’s not just to deliver the vaccines at the front line; it’s also to hire women as supervisors, doctors, and decision-makers. “We cannot succeed without the women we have in the program at all levels,” says Hamid Jafari, a pediatric infectious disease doctor and director of polio eradication for the World Health Organization’s Eastern Mediterranean region.