'Saving children means saving the community': Hargeisa opens a vaccination centre of its own

At Hargeisa Group Hospital, the smallest patients now have a door of their own. Somaliland's Ministry of Health Development, supported by UNICEF, has opened a centre at the hospital dedicated entirely to child immunisation — a single, known place where parents can complete the full course of vaccines that protect against diseases still circulating in the region. Health Minister Dr Hussein Bashir Hirsi thanked UNICEF and donors at the opening; hospital director Dr Ahmed Weli Dahir put the purpose in one sentence: 'Saving children means saving the community.' The centre backs the wider push, with WHO and other partners, to reach children who have missed some or all of their doses — the 'zero-dose' children every health system finds hardest to find — ahead of a new national immunisation strategy running to 2030. Routine, unglamorous, life-saving: exactly the kind of progress that compounds quietly for decades.

SDG 3 · Good health and well-being — Mechanism: institutional program