Email: communications@africacdc.org
Operationalizing Social and Behaviour Change for Immunization Resilience and Vaccine-Preventable Disease Control in Africa
Executive Summary
The Africa CDC SBC Immunization Strategic Framework 2026-2030 provides an Africa-led roadmap for institutionalizing Social and Behaviour Change (SBC) as a core function of immunization systems across African Union Member States. It operationalizes Pillar 4 of the Continental Immunization Strategy (CIS): community engagement, trust-building, and SBC for immunization resilience, while also enabling the wider CIS pillars on sustainable financing, digital transformation, PHC integration, supply resilience, and epidemic ready immunization systems. The framework aligns with Africa’s Health Security and Sovereignty Agenda, Immunization Agenda 2030, and the Africa CDC Strategic Plan.
The strategic framework responds to persistent continental challenges that continue to undermine immunization performance, including zero-dose and under-immunized populations, recurrent vaccine preventable disease outbreaks, misinformation, weak behavioural data systems, fragmented community engagement, and under-financed demand-generation functions. It positions SBC not as a peripheral communication activity, but as a core systems function that strengthens trust, demand, equity, service experience, accountability, and resilience.
The framework is grounded in a sequenced evidence-to-validation process. It draws on the Continental Immunization Strategy (CIS), Africa’s Health Security and Sovereignty agenda, the SBC Situational Intelligence Scan, BeSD capacity assessments and synthesis findings, and a four-day technical validation workshop with 12 Member States: Somalia, Sierra Leone, Uganda, Kenya, Nigeria, South Sudan, Burundi, Cameroon, the Democratic Republic of Congo, Lesotho, Malawi, and Senegal. This grounding ensures that the framework is technically sound, country-informed, regionally representative, and ready for implementation through Africa CDC Headquarters, Regional Collaborating Centres, Member States, and partners. The development and validation of the SBC Immunization Strategic Framework was made possible with funding support from GAVI.
The framework is organized around four institutionalization priorities: strengthening SBC systems and governance; institutionalizing behavioural evidence generation and data use through behavioural intelligence and infodemic management (BIIM), behavioural and social drivers (BeSD), social listening, and community feedback; scaling effective community and frontline engagement; and securing sustainable SBC financing through domestic resource mobilization, costing, budget visibility, and partner alignment. To support country adoption, it promotes a modular package approach: minimum, standard, enhanced, and surge, so countries can implement according to fiscal space, maturity, and immunization priorities while building toward full system institutionalization.
In practical terms, this framework operationalizes CIS Pillar 4 by giving countries the structures, tools, and accountability mechanisms required to act: permanent SBC coordination platforms, integrated behavioural indicators in routine systems, stronger subnational and community delivery, costed and financed SBC plans, and measurable performance indicators linked to uptake and equity. Ultimately, it seeks to ensure that vaccines delivered are vaccines trusted, demanded, accepted, and completed, thereby improving vaccine confidence, reducing zero-dose and dropout rates, and strengthening immunization resilience, health security, and wellbeing across Africa.
