Through youth engagement, the Bingwa Initiative, an initiative that seeks to establish a network of COVID-19 vaccination youth champions across the continent aims to increase the rate of covid-19 vaccination across Africa by 70 percent before 2023.

The strategy is also to get Africa’s young population to mobilise their peers, families, and communities to get vaccinated against the pandemic.

Speaking at the weekend during the covid-19 vaccination scalable models workshop in Lagos, Ngwenya Prudence Nonkululeko, the acting director of the African Union (AU) Commission’s Women, Gender and Youth Directorate said the AU Covid-19 Vaccination Bingwa Initiative is a response to the innovative ways requested by Cyril Ramaphosa, South African President during the African Union Heads of State Summit in January 2022.

“President Ramaphosa called for innovative ways to increase covid-19 vaccination rates to 70 percent by 2023,” she said. “This sparked the idea for the AU COVID-19 Vaccination Bingwa Initiative, co-led by the Women, Gender, and Youth Directorate and the Africa CDC.

“Bingwa is a Kiswahili word that means ‘Champion’, and we want to build a network of health champions throughout Africa,” she added.

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