PESHAWAR, Oct 22: The United Nations Children’s Fund has engaged a non-governmental organisation to sensitise the staff of publications of religious seminaries to the harmful effects of polio and make them aware of the importance of vaccination to protect children against the crippling disease despite halting a similar project last year.

The Unicef which supports mobilisation campaign has engaged a newly-formed NGO to scale up awareness of the editors and writers of publications of religious schools with a view to send a positive message to thousands of readers concerning oral polio vaccine, officials said. The new NGO was registered with the name of International Council for Religious Affairs (ICRA) in Charsadda in April 2013 and given the first assignment by Unicef, they said.

The NGO is based at Darul Uloom Haqqania in Akora Khattak and working on editors and writers of the religious literature with a view to stuff the syllabus and text at the seminaries with pro-immunisation verses and matter and create demand for vaccination, they said.

Officials associated with the anti-polio campaign in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa said that a similar project was initiated by the Unicef in collaboration with the National Research and Development Foundation in 2009 initially in four districts for a few months, but was later extended to the whole province and Federally Administered Tribal Areas due to its success. The project was suddenly terminated in 2012.

The two-year project which had the services of 7,000 ulema, including local prayer leaders and seminary teachers, had directly reduced refusal cases by 26,000, but the Unicef stopped funding forcing its closure in Oct 2012 instead of Dec 2012.

The officials said that the organisation’s role in addressing refusals had been appreciated and presented as a success story before the government, but the Unicef didn’t give any reason for the NRDF’s unceremonious exit from anti-polio campaign.

According to them, the health department was satisfied with the ulema’s role as they had convinced thousands of parents on vaccination. Some of the districts like Peshawar, Mardan, Nowshera, Charsadda and Lakki Marwat had become almost free of refusals, but during the last one year all the districts were recording over 31,000 refusals.

The KP has recorded seven polio cases of the total 50 countrywide in 2013, but presence of refusals had been jeopardising the country’s plan to become polio-free by 2014 due to unvaccinated children. The officials said that Fata with 37 cases was also facing the problem of refusals.

“We have been vaccinating over five million children below five years in every campaign, but the unvaccinated children are a constant threat to them,” said vaccinators in KP.

Health officials who are unaware of the new project told Dawn that the Unicef should cope with refusals through joint strategies with the government. However, they said that discontinuation of the project with KP ulema in 2012 had dealt a blow to the campaign.

Giving the project to a new and small organisation now and terminating collaboration with a bigger and experienced organisation is beyond comprehension, said officials at one of the five high-risk districts.

When contacted, Israr Madni of the ICRA told Dawn that they hadn’t been given a full project, but they did workshops for writers in religious schools for which they were paid. “So far we have held three workshops, two in Islamabad and one in Nowshera, to sensitise the participants,” he said.

Mr Madni said that they had been running an organisation called “Hunarmand” from last six years, which imparted training in embroidery to female students of religious schools in Charsadda. He said that the name of “Hunarmand” was changed to ICRA this year.