The global COVID-19 vaccination rollout is the biggest and fastest in history and no public health intervention compares to it. Under extraordinary time constraints and severe programmatic challenges, in 2021 countries started to undertake a range of approaches and strategies in all aspects of vaccination activities, to permit introducing and deploying COVID-19 vaccine as rapidly and effectively as possible.
Documentation and indexing of these different approaches and strategies, provide an opportunity to foster cross-country learning, facilitate peer-to-peer problem solving, and establish a pool of knowledge and skills to help inform actions that may be leveraged in a future health crisis that requires vaccination. For this reason, a repository of implementation experiences has been developed as a clearinghouse to capture and preserve key country experiences.
The Global Compendium of Country Knowledge on COVID-19 Vaccination aims at offering an organized information space that:
- Facilitates countries, development partners, NGOs and entities supporting vaccine rollout, access to other country’s documented successes and challenges of their COVID-19 vaccination programmes; this would potentially inform about emerging issues in real-time and thus open a pathway for immediate solutions
- Establishes a knowledge platform that creates an operational legacy to inform planning for expanding and strengthening vaccination across the life-course in non-emergency settings, as well as, in how emergency vaccination could be scaled-up in preparation of a future health crisis.
The compendium is directed at national authorities who are responsible for managing or making key decisions on the deployment, implementation and monitoring of COVID-19 vaccination (i.e., NITAGs, senior practitioners like state ministers, coordinators of national COVID-19 Task Forces and program managers like EPI or incident managers), as well as for those who are directly working on routine immunization and life-course vaccination at country level.
Additionally, partners in the One Country Team will also benefit from such a tool in order to provide the required technical support based on the best practices.