Rotary International’s Kick Polio Out of Africa Campaign

Abstract

In 1985, Rotary International, one of the largest non-profit service organizations in the world, with over 1.2 million members working in 30,100 Clubs in more than 160 countries, created PolioPlus—a programme with an initial aim to immunize all the world’s children against polio by 2005—Rotary’s centennial.

As part of this ongoing initiative and the related Kick Polio Out of Africa campaign, and to coincide with the FIFA World Cup Soccer Tournament which was held in South Africa in 2010, Rotary International, through its Africa network of Clubs and Districts, launched a 4-month pan-African public awareness campaign to build support for the final push to Kick Polio out of the continent. The campaign focused on mobilizing parents to help with massive anti-polio drives in the Spring of 2010 which targeted over 100 million African children mainly under 5 years.

At the heart of the campaign was a signed football (representing the polio virus) which traversed all the main countries in Africa affected by polio to highlight the programme and in turn gather the names of distinguished African personalities who were happy to identify themselves with the initiative.

This was one of the most ambitious campaigns of its kind ever to be launched by Rotary International in support of a specific programme, involving sending a soccer ball through 23 polio-affected countries in Africa in 4 months, commencing in South Africa and ending in Egypt with the ball being literally kicked out of the continent towards the Mediterranean Sea. The chapter describes how the campaign was successfully organized and delivered, and the outcomes achieved, including massive publicity and news coverage, substantial fundraising, and a bolstering of critical advocacy and support for the programme by key government officials and traditional leaders in polio-affected countries.