Of Determination and Sacrifice — Honouring a Frontline Polio Worker

This account honours Shaheen Bibi, one of the many women who have carried Pakistan's polio campaign into households that would otherwise have gone unreached.

Why the female frontline is not a supporting role

A large proportion of Pakistan's polio vaccinators and social mobilisers are women, and this is structural. In many households across the country, only a woman can enter and speak to the mother — and the mother is usually the person who decides whether a child receives the drops.

Without female workers, a substantial share of Pakistani children would simply not be reachable by a vaccination campaign. That is the plain operational fact behind every tribute of this kind.

What the work involves

Several rounds a year, each lasting days. A cool box, a tally sheet, a finger marker, a microplan. Hundreds of doors. Summer heat that the cold chain has to survive as well as the worker.

And beyond the mechanics, the part that takes the most from a person: returning to a household that has refused, again, and sitting with a mother to answer the same question patiently for the fourth time. The programme's consistent finding is that refusals are resolved this way — by repetition from someone the family recognises — and not by better arguments from a stranger.

What it costs

Frontline polio workers in Pakistan have been killed carrying out vaccination campaigns, along with the police assigned to protect them. For women the burden compounds: many negotiate their own family's and community's expectations before they can do the job at all, travel in conditions that are not always safe, and are paid modestly for work that is physically demanding and publicly exposed.

See on attacks against polio workers.

What it achieves

Pakistan recorded roughly 20,000 polio cases a year in the early 1990s and 31 in 2025. Almost every child who was paralysed in that period was unvaccinated or under-vaccinated — which means, conversely, that every child who was reached and protected was reached by someone like this.

It is not a metaphor. The reduction is the sum of individual household visits.

How to honour it

Open the door when the team calls. Let every child under five receive the drops, every round. Treat the worker at your door as the person standing between your child and permanent paralysis, because that is what she is.

Related: vaccine heroes · frontline workers