Shaping Global Childhood Vaccination Strategies
While there has been great success in increasing the coverage of new childhood vaccines globally, expanding routine immunization to reach all children and communities has proven more challenging in many low- and middle-income countries. Gavi, the Vaccine Alliance, has a vision of “Leaving no one behind with immunization” by increasing equitable and sustainable use of vaccines, and the World Health Organization’s (WHO) Immunization Agenda 2030 commits to reducing the number of zero-dose children by 50% by 2030. Achieving these targets requires vaccination strategies and interventions that identify and target those unvaccinated, guided by the most current and detailed data regarding their size and spatial distribution.
![Maps showing proportion of children under 1 year of age estimated to have not received the first dose of the DTP vaccine in 2019 at GADM administrative level 2 [31, 37] for Latin America (A), Africa (B), and Asia (C).](https://www.worldpop.org/wp-content/uploads/2025/10/journal.pgph_.0001126.g001-768x746.webp)
WorldPop has partnered with both Gavi and WHO in constructing global methods and datasets to support immunization monitoring and the design of strategies. The WorldPop team integrated small area mapped data on immunization coverage, the numbers and distributions of children of vaccination age, and contextual data on some of the primary locations and features of low vaccination rates. This enabled estimation for the first time globally of the numbers and locations of un-/under-vaccination children in remote rural, conflict-affected and urban slum settings. These outputs and numbers now form part of recent strategies adopted by Gavi, WHO and the Equity Reference Group for Immunization.
