Varsha Venugopal

Thanks for having me.

So we're a two-year-old startup nonprofit working on improving uptake of routine immunization in India.

Two things that are top priorities for us right now.

One is we're in the middle of an iterative cycle for one of our programs, the ambassador program, to figure out the best ways to scale it up.

And second, we are planning an upgrade of our monitoring and evaluation system, which will allow us to make a more compelling case for the impact of our programs.

I think it's a particularly important moment now compared to any other moment because we know for the last couple of years there has been millions of kids who have dropped off in India as well as abroad as a result of COVID-related lockdowns.

And we have this huge sense of urgency to get these children back on track.

We have 19 million children who fail to receive their basic vaccinations by the time of their first birthdays each year.

We know as a result, one child dies every minute because of vaccine preventable disease.

So 19 million children are under-vaccinated.

And that's a really good question because there is something called the zero dose, which means they haven't received any vaccinations.

But with these 19 million children, what we are specifically referring to is that they are under-vaccinated, which means they haven't completed their full dose by the time they turn one.

Yeah, absolutely.

So we know we are talking about vaccines saving two to three million child deaths every year.

We know there are huge social and economic benefits at both individual and societal levels.

So we know that there are costs related to medical treatments and also related to income and productivity losses, as well as, I mean, one can imagine the whole suffering of family and friends.

There is also some evidence of association between vaccination and childhood development and educational outcomes.

I think broadly there is a fair degree of consensus between experts that for every $1 invested in expanding immunization, there are about $60 returns in social, economic and environmental benefits.

So the big countries that are there are Afghanistan, Pakistan, DRC, Ethiopia, Indonesia, Nigeria, and of course, India.

India, which of course we'll come to later, has about half of these under-vaccinated children.