Democratic Republic of the Congo Expanded Programme on Immunization

The Democratic Republic of the Congo's national program to prevent childhood illness and death from vaccine-preventable disease, established in 1978 as the country's Expanded Programme on Immunization, known locally by its French initials PEV. The program has achieved significant milestones despite operating in a country with persistent large-scale outbreaks of polio, measles and yellow fever, minimal and often delayed funding, and a large number of children who go entirely unvaccinated: the Democratic Republic of the Congo was certified free of wild poliovirus in 2014 and eliminated maternal and neonatal tetanus in 2019, and it introduced the 13-valent pneumococcal conjugate vaccine into its routine three-dose infant schedule in 2011. To address stagnating routine coverage, the program worked with global partners from 2018 to 2020 on the Mashako Plan, a revitalization strategy aiming to raise full immunization coverage among children aged 12 to 23 months by 15 percentage points across nine of the country's 26 provinces within eighteen months.