In the Democratic Republic of Congo, less than one percent of the population is vaccinated against COVID-19 even though it began its vaccination campaign in April 2021. In order to improve the results, in November VillageReach started supporting the Congolese government to vaccinate a large number of people through the vaccinodromes launched in four areas of Kinshasa, which include Gombe, Kalamu, Masina and N’djili. The overall goal of the initiative is to ensure the accessibility and availability of vaccines, bringing them closer to where people live and work.
Join us through this photo series as we go through a high-level tour of the sites.
Vaccinodrome at at Saint-Thérèse in N’djili
The site is located in the middle of a large football field, surrounded by households and small businesses. As we had seen in our first two tours of vaccinodromes – of Place des Évolués, Place des Artistes and Marché de la Liberté – each site is designed with its environment in mind and, in this vibrant and huge football field, young people between the ages of 16 and 25 spend almost all day in the field and apprentice drivers also come to venture there. The floating population is also not to be neglected in this area. Learn more about the vaccinodrome deployments here.
In order to reach everyone and be understood by everyone, the awareness message on the banner around the site remains in Lingala as in other vaccination sites.
Under this blue tent, the temperature of the clients is taken by the sorter, who also assigns identifiers to the clients. Identifiers are unique codes that identify each client, allowing their vaccination history to be traced.
The complete registration of clients is completed by the input recorders.
The tent and layout of the vaccinodrome is practically the same as that of Masina, with the only difference being that the space reserved for observation is outside the vaccinodrome.
Clients’ eligibility for vaccination is declared by the clinician after consultation. The clinician also has the role of presenting to clients the different antigens available at the site.
The medical history of the clients is evaluated on the basis of an individual sheet (pre-vaccination consultation sheet) by the clinician.
The vaccinator carries out some prerequisites before vaccinating clients with the vaccine of their choice, including filling in the vaccine batch number, the expiration date on the vaccination card and the pre-vaccination consultation sheet, where they sign by putting their name and the date of administration of the vaccine.
Participants complete the exit registration, which is the last step in the vaccination process before going to the observation area.
Here we are at the end of our tour. We hope that you enjoyed the trip.
As of April 2022, the four vaccinodromes had registered 27,427 vaccinated people, including 22,561 for the first dose and 4,866 for the second dose.