On the morning of 27 August 2025, the fourth day of nationwide efforts to deliver the new oral polio vaccine type 2 (nOPV2), health supervisors from WHO Somalia visited Toon, a small village about 20 km southeast of Hargeisa in Somaliland.

At the local maternal and child health centre in the village, the team met 25-year-old Somali mother Hamda Awil Jama and her three-and-a-half-year-old daughter Masna Abdirizak. To their surprise, Hamda revealed that Masna had never received a single routine childhood vaccine.

“I thought I was just bringing Masna for a nutrition check,” recalls Hamda Awil Jama. “But then my daughter received her very first vaccines.”

Hamda explains how the situation arose. “After moving to the village of Jibase I went to the maternal and child health centre in Toon village, 7 km away, to have my daughter checked for nutrition. Before we moved to the village, we were pastoralists and farmers living deep in the Hawd area. I gave birth to my daughter Masna in a place where we had no knowledge of immunization and no access to health services.”