The United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF) has commenced vaccination of 9-year-old girls against the Human Papillomavirus to tackle cervical cancer in five local government areas in Osun State.

The local government areas are Ife North, Ife South, Ede North, Ede South and Osogbo.

The agency, held a two-day stakeholders’ seminar held in Osogbo, the capital of Osun State, where it lamented the uncooperative disposition of of parents and guidance to allow their adolescent girls to take the vaccine.

The UNICEF Adolescent Development Specialist, Ngozi Sangu said: “We realised that the HPV vaccine in some LGs has a low performance.

The data shows that we do not have a good response in terms of the optic for 9-year-old girls. Hence, this meeting is to again re-sensitize the stakeholders in Osun State, ensuring that the momentum doesn’t drop.

“We are talking about regionalisation, there needs to be some kind of increased efforts, we need to change the methodology in which we target them. We need parents to be able to give consent and we need to be able to target how we reach them differently.”

He noted that the agency in partnership with Osun State Government has vaccinated over 29,000 adolescent girls in the state.

We are talking about regionalisation, there needs to be some kind of increased efforts, we need to change the methodology in which we target them. We need parents to be able to give consent and we need to be able to target how we reach them differently.”

He noted that the agency in partnership with Osun State Government has vaccinated over 29,000 adolescent girls in the state.

Also, the Osun State Immunisation Officer, Francisca Olaore said : “We are targeting 3 million of these 9-year-old girls. We implore parents and caregivers to ignore negative rumours around the vaccine in a bid to safeguard the future of the girl child against cervical cancer.”

Earlier in her remarks, UNICEF young leader on HPV advocacy, Rabiah Busari explained that “In this particular project, we’ll be engaging 5 local governments and recruiting 3 volunteers from each local government, making 15 volunteers that we’ll be working with for the span of 6 months.

“A Multi-Age Campaign was done in 2024 and we checked the data of all local governments in Osun State and how many people got vaccinated during this Multi-Age Campaign and these 5 local governments were identified for their low turnout of this vaccine.

“So, we are going back to these communities to vaccinate them so that we can see that more 9-year-old girls are vaccinated, prevented from cervical cancer and HPV.”