Africa Adopts 10-Year Plan to Protect Hard-Won Polio Gains

African health ministers have adopted a new 10-year framework designed to protect the continent's progress against polio and prevent decades of public-health investment from being lost.

The framework was approved during the 76th session of the World Health Organization Regional Committee for Africa in Addis Ababa, running from 25 to 28 August.

Africa was certified free of indigenous wild poliovirus in 2020, one of the continent's greatest public-health achievements.

But eradication does not mean surveillance can simply stop.

Variant polioviruses can continue circulating in under-immunised communities, while imported infections remain possible. Weakening surveillance too quickly could therefore allow transmission to re-emerge undetected.

The new framework focuses on maintaining sensitive disease surveillance, strong laboratory systems, high population immunity, rapid outbreak response and safe containment of poliovirus material.

Another important element is what happens to the enormous infrastructure created through decades of polio eradication.

Thousands of trained workers, laboratories, surveillance networks and community relationships have been developed across Africa. Rather than dismantling that infrastructure as polio declines, health ministers want it integrated into wider national health systems.

That could allow expertise built to defeat one disease to strengthen responses to measles, Ebola and other infectious threats.

Source: WHO Regional Office for Africa, 27 August 2026.