K-Electric and UNICEF Unite Against Childhood Preventable Diseases

K-Electric, Karachi's power utility, partnered with UNICEF to support immunisation against childhood preventable diseases, including polio.

Why Karachi specifically

Karachi has been one of the most persistent poliovirus reservoirs in the world for decades. Environmental surveillance sites across the city have returned poliovirus-positive sewage samples consistently over many years, frequently in periods when no case has been reported — which is the clearest available evidence of continuous silent transmission.

Sindh recorded 23 confirmed cases in 2024, second only to Balochistan, and the province's polio problem is fundamentally urban.

What makes a mega-city hard to vaccinate

Urban campaigns fail differently from rural ones. In a village, a team knows who lives where. In a dense Karachi neighbourhood the obstacles are structural:

• Repeated absence. Children are simply not at home when teams call — working parents, children at madrassas or with relatives. "Not available" becomes the dominant reason children are missed, ahead of refusal.
• Population churn. High tenancy turnover means microplans built on last round's households are already out of date.
• Informal settlements. Areas that formal plans systematically under-count.
• Sanitation. Poliovirus spreads by the faecal-oral route, and inadequate sanitation with shared water sources accelerates transmission in exactly these neighbourhoods.
• Constant movement. Families moving between the city and rural districts, and between provinces for work, continually import and export virus.

Why a utility is a useful partner

A power utility has something the polio programme needs and cannot easily build: a relationship with essentially every household in the city, and detailed knowledge of where those households actually are — including in settlements that formal mapping misses.

Utility partnerships have supported awareness messaging, community mobilisation in served areas, and health camps delivering integrated services. Those camps matter because they change the interaction: a team arriving with routine immunisation, maternal health and nutrition services is offering something families want, rather than making the same request for the tenth time.

Beyond polio

Framing the partnership around childhood preventable diseases generally, rather than polio alone, reflects a deliberate shift. Families in underserved neighbourhoods have often asked why so much effort goes into polio drops when their children lack basic health services. Integrated delivery is the programme's answer. See low routine immunisation.

Related

urban transmission in Sindh · high-risk areas · surveillance