With just two months of our Rotary year to run, I request everyone to step up their efforts of ‘quietly encouraging’ Rotary Clubs and Rotarians to contribute to the END POLIO NOW campaign when considering their end of year donations.
 
Never has the need for funding been so important … especially when we note the amazing resilience and service coming out of countries like Pakistan …
Two weeks ago, Pakistan launched a new nationwide polio vaccination drive to reach 38.7 million children and push toward final eradication of the potentially deadly virus in one of the last endemic countries in our world!
 
Nearly 260,000 volunteers and workers fanned out across Pakistan in a sustained effort to reach every child under five in the week long campaign.
Pakistan’s national coordinator Mohammad Safdar told the Reuters news agency that everyone was cooperating with the door-to-door effort.
“The situation in our country has improved dramatically from 306 cases in 2014, to just eight last year and only ONE so far in 2018,” he said.
 
Efforts to eradicate the disease have been undermined by opposition from the Taliban and other Islamist militants who say immunisation is a foreign ploy to sterilise Muslim children or a cover for Western spies.
 
In January, gunmen killed a mother and daughter vaccination team working in the southwestern province of Baluchistan – where this year’s lone case of Polio was reported.
So, the 2017/18 request from RI President Ian Riseley and the Polio Eradication Program was simple –
  • Individual Rotary Clubs are requested to donate a special grant of $1,500 in addition to normal giving to END POLIO NOW.
  • All Districts urged to donate 20% of unused DDF to the Polio Eradication Campaign.
  • Districts and Clubs are urged to continue the search for TRF Major donors – at US$10,000 each.
  • Districts and Clubs are requested to include special promotions within their annual programs to celebrate World Polio Day on October 24 and Rotary’s birthday on February 23 every year.
Please be sure to thank your clubs and Rotarians for everything they are doing to sustain the Polio Eradication Campaign.
PDG Bob Aitken AM JP
RI END POLIO NOW Coordinator, Zones 7B/Part 8, 2014/18.