Health
Polio can return in 10 years if vaccination stops — Rotary president
Rotary International President, Yinka Babalola, in this interview with WALE AKINSELURE, highlights Rotary’s strides in the global fight against polio, the organisation’s efforts to strengthen health systems and prevent future health crises, as well as the critical role of governments in sustaining humanitarian interventions
In your Rotary journey, you have provided leadership in polio eradication, vaccine distribution, and adult literacy. Upon your emergence as President of Rotary International, you came up with this theme, ‘Create lasting impact.’ What will be your priorities for the next year of your leadership?
I’m pleased to be uniting our members to create lasting impact and help them share how Rotary has transformed their lives. My goal is to show the world that Rotary is more than a service organisation. It’s not just about what we do for others. It is a life-changing experience because being a member of Rotary inspires personal growth, just as much as community impact. Our vision statement is that, together, we see a world where people unite and take action to create lasting change across the globe, in our communities, and in ourselves. And my goal is to help us stay and realise the words, the deliverables of that vision statement, at every level of the organisation. Our areas of focus are community development, economic empowerment, basic education, including water and sanitation. We are an international organisation, but we function locally. Every Rotary club, wherever they are located, tries to do something in these areas of focus. We have asked Rotary clubs to look into their communities, look at what the community needs, and try to see how they can intervene. And not just intervening with the resources available to them; we can also use our connections, leverage our internationality to bring in resources, which is not just about money. Sometimes it’s about expertise and knowledge because the person who is more knowledgeable about something may not be present in a particular community. But we are a network of leaders, of professionals, of business people. We leverage that also to do things. So you find out, for example, that in Nigeria, Rotary clubs are building schools, improving schools, supporting education in many ways. My own Rotary club of Trans Amadi, for example, has one of the biggest spelling bees to encourage children to read and to spell, to improve their language skills. Clubs are providing computer literacy. Rotary clubs in Ghana are teaching young people coding. Again, my own Rotary club of Trans Amadi is doing a vocational training program. We do it every year, where close to 400 people are given vocational skills that will help them to go out and stand on their own and be able to earn a living. And this is done by Rotary clubs across the globe based on the needs of their communities.
There’s a lot of focus on Rotary’s fight against polio. What other humanitarian issue does Rotary consider deserving greater global attention?
Rotary combines our global reach, our local resources, and our highly skilled members with a funding structure that distributes close to $270 million annually. And that is to provide clean water and sanitation, to support basic literacy and education, to prevent and treat disease, improve maternal and child health, improve community economies, grow local economies, promote peace, and protect the environment. You talk about our flagship program, polio eradication. Yes, polio eradication is our number one external corporate project, and we started this in 1988, and we brought in the other partners. We brought in the World Health Organisation and the United Nations Children’s Fund to this initiative, which we call the Global Polio Eradication Initiative. The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation and the Gavi Alliance joined much later. And Rotary has contributed over $3 billion and countless volunteer hours to the global effort to eradicate polio. Our commitment is to eradicate this disease, and by the time we’re done, it will be the second disease in humanity’s history to be ever eradicated. So our promise to the children of the world is that we will eradicate this disease. When we started, 125 countries were polio endemic, and polio was maiming or killing 1,000 children every day. But, thanks to our effort and those of our partners, the incidence of polio has plummeted by more than 99.9 per cent, and now of the 125 countries that were endemic when we started, only Pakistan and Afghanistan remain widely polio-endemic. The whole of Africa, Nigeria, was certified wide polio-free in 2020/2021. And, as of the report I got as of the 27th of July 2026, we have seen only 18 cases of wild polio: 15 reported in Afghanistan, and three cases reported in Pakistan. We are at the end of July, and we’ve had only 18 cases, down from 1,000 cases per day. So we’re talking about nearly 360,000 cases every year when we started, and now we are down to just 18 as of July. So that is a great feat, and we are very happy with the progress we have made.
Given insecurity in those countries, are you confident eradication is still achievable within this decade?
Rotary’s primary role is ending polio, because in the Global Polio Eradication Initiative, we have roles assigned to each of the partners. Rotary’s primary role is fundraising, advocacy, raising awareness, and volunteer mobilisation. For me, my work with polio eradication, throughout the years- and I mean many years- has given me a clear understanding of the practical challenges involved in reaching every child with life-saving vaccines because until the last child is reached, no child is safe anywhere in the world. We cannot say, just 18 cases, only Pakistan and Afghanistan; everybody else can go to sleep. That is not the way it works. So, we need to continue to immunise our children until polio is eradicated.
If you could mobilise world leaders to battle a particular humanitarian cause today, what would that be?
As a Rotarian, I would say we need the world to focus and let us finish with polio. This is because for polio, we know what to do. There are many other diseases that we don’t know how to eradicate. We know how to treat, but we don’t know how to eradicate. For polio, we know what to do to eliminate it, for it to be gone forever. We have the knowledge; the only thing that is left is to get the vaccines to the mouth of every child. And we need to keep the governments focused, both countries where polio is still endemic and governments of countries like Nigeria where routine immunisation is still poor and leading to variants of some of the viruses. Routine immunisation needs to be at about 90 per cent. Some of our states in Nigeria are as low as 16 per cent. If routine immunisation is top-notch, nobody will have to bother about any of this. Children will not die from some of those preventable diseases. So, all the governments need to be focused so that those who are donors who help and donate to this effort will not get tired. They will remain committed until the job is finished. If we stop vaccinating today, in a matter of 10 years, we’ll be back to 200,000 children getting crippled by polio. And that will be a complete loss of all the gains that we have made over the years. We need to finish this job so that we can commit these resources to other things. There are still many other things we can deal with. But the good thing with polio is we can eradicate it. We cannot afford to be fatigued. We are at the very last mile of this race. And like any last mile, this is when we need to remain focused and do it.
How is Rotary preparing communities for future pandemics?
There were systems that our polio eradication program had put in place. We went out to eradicate polio. But to be able to make that happen, there were health systems that were missing that we had to help put in place, from the community mobilizers to the sensitisation efforts to the cold chain for storing the vaccines, because the vaccines must be at a particular temperature at the time they reach the child. There is the issue of vaccine efficacy, because if the vaccines are no longer potent, it is a waste of time. So, it must be kept at certain temperatures, right from production up to the time it gets into the mouth of a child. So that is the whole system that has been built across the communities. We call it the polio legacy.
The good thing with this is that these systems we have helped build are being used for other health emergencies. For example, the contact tracing mechanism we use when there’s a polio outbreak was deployed for Ebola. It was deployed for COVID-19. The house-to-house mechanism, the enumeration process, identification and mapping to be able to get to every child are the kind of systems that we have built, as well as the one for vaccine storage. So you find in many places where ordinarily there is no electricity in the wards, up to the cities. We now have provisions like solar refrigerators, storage systems, and accountability frameworks. Those are systems we have built, and they are being used for other health emergencies also. In fact, you may also note that, in Nigeria, for example, what the government is trying to do is to leverage our polio framework for other immunisations also, like the vaccine-preventable diseases for children. Those are part of the frameworks that we have built that are being used for other illnesses.
Rotary has worked closely with governments and communities for decades. Which partnership in Nigeria would you say has delivered the greatest impact?
It’s our partnership for the eradication of polio. This is because without the governments, at every level, we may not have achieved the results that we have achieved. For example, the Federal Government of Nigeria is committed to polio eradication. In fact, I recall when I had the privilege of visiting former President Muhammadu Buhari when I was Vice President of Rotary International. He said, ‘Look, I don’t know who I’m going to hand over to. But I know one thing; I will not hand over polio to my successor.’ And then he went out and immunised his own grandchild in public, so people would know he was not asking others to do what he would not do himself. Commitments like that work. We had what we call the Abuja Declaration, under which deputy governors of every state were made responsible for immunisation. Initially, it focused on polio, but it has since expanded to other forms of immunisation. Also, during National Immunisation Days, activities extend right down to the ward level. Without governments, achieving these results would have been very difficult. So, our partnership with government on polio eradication remains one of our biggest successes.
Beyond polio, what other health programmes is Rotary implementing in Nigeria, and what impact have they had?
Rotary has three main programmes running in Nigeria as I speak to you. I’m not talking about what our clubs are doing in their various communities; I’m referring to initiatives funded through the Rotary Foundation. We have spent about $375 million on polio eradication in Nigeria, funding the World Health Organisation’s disease surveillance activities while Rotary focuses on fundraising.
Another major initiative is our Programme of Scale, Together for Healthy Families, which targets maternal and infant mortality. We launched pilot projects in Abuja, Nasarawa, Gombe and Ekiti states, investing more than $2 million. We initially targeted a 25 per cent reduction in maternal deaths, but achieved more than a 50 per cent reduction in both maternal and infant mortality in the pilot areas. Our objective is to demonstrate to governments that if they adopt proven interventions, these deaths can be drastically reduced. Nigeria has one of the highest maternal mortality rates in the world, which is why Nigerian Rotarians considered this a priority. We have already expanded the programme to 17 local government areas in Oyo State. During one visit to Gombe, where one of our pilot health centres is located, the chief medical officer told me they had recorded no maternal or infant deaths during childbirth in the previous 12 months. That is lasting impact. One of the programme’s innovations is what we call community dialogue. In one community, leaders agreed that if a man lost his wife during childbirth because he failed to support her in accessing healthcare, he would not be allowed to marry another woman within that community. That social accountability encouraged husbands to ensure pregnant women attended health centres and sought financial support from community leaders where necessary. Ekiti State also recorded remarkable success. After seeing the results in our pilot locations, the state government expanded the same approach to other local governments and health facilities. That is exactly what we hope other states will do because Rotary’s role is to demonstrate what works. We are also implementing the Healthy Community Challenge, a $9.8 million initiative aimed at reducing child deaths from malaria, diarrhoea and pneumonia. Pilot projects are currently underway in Kebbi and Akwa Ibom states because they have some of the country’s highest burdens of these diseases. Our goal is to ensure mothers survive childbirth and children live beyond the age of five by preventing avoidable deaths. That is the kind of lasting impact Rotary seeks to achieve.
From your experience in the field, what do you see as the reason for low routine immunisation?
Many things are involved. Sometimes it is resistance from the parents. A lot of times it is the mechanism to get it to them. A lot of times it is insecurity. Some of our immunizers have been shot in the line of duty. Rotary supports their family when that happens. We don’t wish that people have to shed blood to protect children. So, insecurity is one of them. You need to be able to get those vaccines to the places. Some places are difficult to reach. You must have seen images where people are carrying vaccine carriers on their heads and swimming through pools of flood just to get to the other side of the village. There are villages we cannot reach by road. I’ve had to travel on a camel myself to be able to get to some places. And these things are not cheap. Also, one very worrying moment across our continent is the election time that we are coming to now, in Nigeria. As elections are coming, governments are distracted. At the local government level, they are distracted. The councillor is distracted; the local government chairman is distracted; the state governor is distracted; the health commissioner is distracted. And vaccination needs to continue. They need to continue to release what we call counterpart funding so that we can get all the resources we need to get these vaccinators to the places they need to get to immunise the children. With the elections, they are not there. They are running after other things, but there’s something called visible leadership commitment. When a deputy governor or a state governor says, “Oh, we have National Immunisation Day next month, and chairs a meeting, he mandates the local government chairman that they must chair the evening review meetings during the immunisation days to make sure that any report that the immunisers come back with at the end of every day. If there’s any problem, he goes to solve it. There will be no non-compliance. The local government chairman is supposed to do that. But if he’s somewhere else attending some meeting for his re-election, supporting something for the governor’s elections, that is a lot of distraction.
There is rising poverty, not just in Nigeria but across several other countries. How is the Rotary club responding to issues of rising poverty, conflict, displacement, and climate change across different regions?
All these tie in with our areas of focus. We are looking at the things affecting the environment, because sometimes environmental degradation leads to poverty. You know, climate change sounds like a political word, for example. But if there is desertification, the people cannot farm. They cannot have good yields. Rotary is addressing many of those. Rotary is helping with reforestation in many places. In fact, I recall, I think it was in Croatia, you know, where there was a big fire that damaged a lot of the olive tree farms, which is a source of income for people. People have just simply gone hungry and broke. But Rotary helped them to replant and reforest. Even in so-called developed countries like the United States, there was a massive fire a few years back in California that destroyed, that burned down the vegetation on the hills. Rotary helped, you know, by trying to replant that vegetation and restore the environment as it is. I know that Rotary has a partnership with the United Nations Environmental Programme to improve the environment. And I know we are cleaning up rivers in some parts of the world now. There is also a major project to clean up the Mediterranean and remove some of the waste that we have inside the place. This is because when the environment is cleaner, people can take resources from the environment. If the rivers are clean, you may have the generation of aquatic life, and that could provide food for people. Rotary is involved in all of that. In Ibadan, at the reception by the Jericho Business Club, Rotary started a conversation with the International Institute of Tropical Agriculture. They have a program for young people, some agripreneurial programs for young people. And Rotary in Ibadan is going to be working with the IITA to think about how they can scale up some of those programmes to benefit the young people. And we have many projects like that addressing issues of poverty. Rotary provides microcredit. My own club does one; many clubs do it, providing microcredit with almost zero interest, to help people start businesses and sustain themselves. And we have watched this happen; we’ve watched people’s lives transformed.
How is the Rotary leveraging technology and Artificial Intelligence to change the way it delivers humanitarian services?
We have a policy on artificial intelligence. Artificial intelligence has its drawbacks, but one of the Rotary’s action plans is also the ability to adapt. We are leveraging technology to do the things that we do. For example, it is affecting the way we communicate. So if you have 1.4 million members who speak God knows how many languages around the world, and you need to reach them, technology is making that very easy. For example, at a meeting in Zurich, Switzerland, on the 6th of July, I had requested that, with available technology, the message that goes from me as President to members of this organisation, I want it as much as possible to be delivered to them in the language that they are familiar with. We have official languages, just about nine of them, but there are many other languages people speak. And I was very pleased to hear from a Rotarian who is in the Netherlands, and one who is German, who came to me and said, ‘Thank you, Mr President, for the first time in my 30 years of membership in Rotary, I got your message in Dutch, you know. And those who speak Swahili will probably receive it in Swahili. And that’s the direction it is helping us with in terms of communication. It is also helping us in terms of project planning, project delivery, and community assessment for the things that we do. So, local Rotary clubs are leveraging all of that. And as we do the grants that our Rotary Foundation gives to our clubs to do good in their communities, that is also coming into it, leveraging technology. And again, even in implementation, I’ll give you an example. There’s a project we had to plant trees. I think it was somewhere in Morocco. It was a vast area of the desert we wanted to green up. And drones were used. It was not a case of getting humans to go and plant these things. You know, we just programmed drones, and the drones simply dispersed the seedlings that we wanted to plant. And they could then do a large area over a short period of time. That is effectiveness, that is efficiency, that is lasting impact.
Rotary manages hundreds of millions of dollars annually. Have you ever uncovered misuse of Rotary funds, and how was it handled?
We have some of the best stewardship programs in the world. Our Rotary Foundation, which funds many of the grants to our clubs, has been certified 4 Star by an assessing authority called the Charity Navigator. It’s a US certifying evaluation body. And 4-Star is the highest rating any organisation can have. Rotary has scored 4-Star in the last 17 consecutive years. And that is because they assess our stewardship process. In fact, you know what I tell people: Rotary’s funds do not go missing. We have those stewardship protocols to make sure that we reduce the possibility of the money getting lost in the first place.
For young people who want to make a difference but lack the resources, how do you advise such people to get on board?
You are correct; you cannot give what we don’t have. Some resources are required, but resources are not just money. People have talents; people have time. Rotary has a cost, yes. And that’s why there is now flexibility. In the past, 35, 40 years ago, a Rotary Club would meet at the Sheraton Hotel, and they would meet for breakfast, for lunch, or for dinner. And they have to pay N30,000 for breakfast or for lunch or for dinner. A lot of that is changing. That is why there are Rotary Clubs that are meeting in coffee shops now because they’re younger people. The food you eat, the environment of your food, is not a direct correlation with the connections you can build. Do you have talents that you can share? That’s a resource. Let me tell you one of the things I’m driving this year is value. I’m trying to restore the emotional connection of Rotarians back to Rotary because every time we’re talking about Rotary to people, they ask what this Rotary is about. Our members tend to talk about what we do for others. So, we will say, we have provided toilets and water, a peace centre, a sickle cell centre. People talk about those things which are things we do for others. But Rotary transforms us. Rotary makes us better people. Rotary changes our perception of the environment. Rotary creates lasting impact, lasting change in us as members. Each time we go out to change people’s lives, our own lives get changed. So the question is this: is there any age where somebody doesn’t require or desire a lasting change in his or her life? There is none. You’re talking to a 30-year-old young engineer, a 50-year-old accountant, a 70-year-old retired doctor; everybody desires lasting change in their lives. And Rotary gives you that opportunity to do so. So you can interface with Rotary at every single point. For younger people below the age of 30, they can do that via Rotaract. If you have children that are in secondary schools, they can join the Interact Club and start to prepare themselves for leadership.
Rotary clubs in several countries face ageing membership. What strategies are being implemented to attract younger people?
Rotary is growing in Africa, including Nigeria. Rotary is growing in Asia. Rotary is ageing out in some parts of Europe. Rotary is growing in Eastern Europe, though not as fast as we wish. In the United States, it is ageing, and in Australia, it is ageing. We are working on bringing down the average age with our diversity policy. And Rotaract is a Rotary membership type for young professionals. Rotary has a lot of youth programs like our Rotary Youth Leadership Award, which every district runs every year. We also have Rotary Youth Exchange programs. There is also our Interact program for secondary schools. So, we have many programs dedicated to the youth. One of the things we have missed is that we have made these investments without looking at directly reaping the investment. What has happened to us in the past is that we have simply said we are developing these young people for citizenship, for leadership, for the world. And so, when they’re done with our youth program, wherever they go, it will be useful to the world. We are changing that now. We want you to be useful to the world. We also want your connection back to where that investment was made. And that is beginning to yield results. And the issue about women also, there are some parts of our Rotary world where the men-to-women ratio is almost 50-50. We have to make sure that Rotary is diverse and representative of the community. Of course, if a Rotary club is based in a retirement city, there are some towns in some developed parts of the world where people retire to. Rotarians will reflect that community, so you will not find young people there. But in other parts, we want Rotary to be a representation of the community, and it will show the demographics of the place. The other thing we are doing is to make Rotary flexible and available to young people to connect and do Rotary the way they like to, so long as our core values are not jeopardised. We now have new model clubs, hybrid clubs using available technology to cater for those who travel a lot, such that anywhere you travel to, you can still connect back to your Rotary clubs. They are having what we call cause-based clubs. They’re having interest-based clubs. So there are clubs, for example, now they simply say ‘Our interest is environment.’ That is what we want to focus on. They are interest-based. And we have clubs that are completely made up of musicians. That is their interest. So we are beginning to have all of that. And because every generation, every group of people, irrespective of age, have some kind of interest that they support, that is beginning to bring down the average age. This year, as president of Rotary International, I’m championing and driving a goal. Our board set a goal that we want to have 1.25 million Rotarians and over 125,000 Rotaractors by our 125th anniversary, which comes up in the year 2030. This year, I’m investing a lot of effort and a lot of resources in delivering on that goal. You know, it is part of the things I’m working on that I’m hoping that at the end of my year, the decline you referred to will be clear to everybody that that decline is reversing. And hopefully by the time we get to 2030, we’ll achieve our goal. If not, surpass it.
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