Nigeria Touts Online Vaccine Registration Despite over Half of Nation Lacking Internet Access

Nigerians can now register online to receive a Chinese coronavirus vaccine, Nigeria’s government announced Monday, though Internet access remains scarce in the country, with less than half of Nigerians able use it.

Citizens of Nigeria can now access a new online government platform that “captures data and schedules persons for COVID 19 [Chinese coronavirus] vaccination,” Nigeria’s National Primary Health Care Development Agency (NPHCDA) said on March 1. The platform is known as the Electronic Management of Immunization Data (EMID) Registration Portal.

Nigeria received 3,924,000 doses of a coronavirus vaccine developed by the British-Swedish pharmaceutical company AstraZeneca and Oxford University on March 2. The shipment arrived in Abuja on Tuesday at no cost to the Nigerian government, as it was delivered courtesy of the World Health Organization’s COVAX Facility, a global initiative set up to distribute coronavirus vaccines to poorer nations.

Nigeria’s National Hospital in Abuja will host the country’s first COVAX vaccination site, where the hospital’s staff will be among the first Nigerians to receive the free vaccine.

“These staff would also be electronically registered in the Covid-19 [coronavirus] vaccine database and would receive their COVID-19 vaccination card which has a QR code that can be verified worldwide,” Faisal Shuaib, the executive director of Nigeria’s NPHCDA, told Nigeria’s Business Day on Tuesday.

The NPHCDA announced its new online initiative to register Nigerians for the COVAX vaccines on Monday despite a recent report indicating that less than half of Nigerians have access to the internet. At least 60 percent of Nigeria’s population of 200 million are without internet access, the Nigerian newspaper Vanguard reported last February.

“[O]nly 85.49 million Nigerians have internet access, some 42 percent of the total population. Additionally, only 27 million of those internet-enabled Nigerians have social media accounts that they run actively,” according to the newspaper.

The dearth of internet access in Nigeria, Africa’s most populous country, appears to be representative of a general lack of online access across the African continent.

“Africa has about 1.2 billion people. With 870 million without internet access, the continent only has about 400 million people connected to the internet,” according to Vanguard.

Pew Research Center surveyed six sub-Saharan African countries in October 2018 and found that “a median of 41 percent … use the internet occasionally or own an internet-capable smartphone.”

According to the research center, “Sub-Saharan Africa has a lower level of internet use than any other geographic region, ranging from a high of 59 percent in South Africa to a low of 25 percent in Tanzania.”

By comparison, “89 percent of Americans said they use the internet” when responding to a January 2018 Pew Research Center survey.

Internet access has become so vital to everyday life that the United Nations passed a nonbinding resolution in 2016 condemning the disruption of internet access as a violation of human rights.