Punjab Pilots a Mobile App for Polio Campaign Monitoring

Punjab piloted a mobile application to support polio campaign monitoring, part of a wider move in Pakistan's programme from paper reporting toward digital, near-real-time data.

The problem digital monitoring addresses

Historically, campaign data arrived on paper: teams filled tally sheets, supervisors aggregated them, and district totals reached the provincial and national level days after the round had finished. By the time a problem was visible, the round was over and the children were still unvaccinated.

There was a second, larger problem. Administrative coverage is self-reported, and it has consistently been the least reliable indicator in eradication programmes worldwide. A team under pressure can mark a house as covered without vaccinating the child in it.

What mobile data collection changes

• Speed. Coverage data arrives during the round rather than after it, so supervisors can redeploy teams to areas that are falling behind while there is still time.
• Granularity. Union council and settlement-level data rather than district aggregates — which matters because a district reporting 97 per cent coverage can still be missing children in three specific union councils.
• Verification. GPS tracking of team movement and time-stamped records make it considerably harder to report a house as covered that was never visited.
• Missed-children tracking. Recording not just how many children were missed but why — refused, not available, house locked — which is the disaggregation the programme actually needs, because each reason requires a different fix.

Why Punjab

Punjab has by far the largest population in Pakistan and has been effectively clear of polio for most of the past decade — one case in 2024, in a year when the national total was 74. That makes it a sensible place to pilot: a large-scale test in a well-resourced setting, before deployment in the districts where the margin for error is smallest.

It also matters because Punjab's clean record depends on maintaining immunity in a very large population, and environmental samples have tested positive there. See WPV1 in Attock.

What technology does not solve

Better data shows where children are being missed. It does not open a union council that campaigns cannot safely enter, and it does not change the mind of a parent who has refused. Those require access negotiation at political level and patient engagement by trusted local voices respectively.

Digital monitoring makes the programme's real problems visible faster. Solving them is still human work.

Related: programme structure · eradication strategy