The World Health Organization African Region (WHO AFRO) is celebrating the one-year anniversary of certifying Africa free of wild polio on Wednesday.

Coordinated efforts, close monitoring, and widespread vaccinations led to the historic feat — even more impressive when you take the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic, and its disruption of vaccine efforts, into account.

Though the battle against non-wild polio virus types and other diseases across the African continent continues, experts and advocates say the anniversary marks an incredible win for unified efforts, medicine, health workers, and volunteers.

In 1988, the World Health Assembly formed the Global Polio Eradication Initiative (GPEI) to eradicate polio by the year 2000. At the time, polio was endemic in 125 countries and paralyzed 350,000 children each year. The GPEI worked across borders, forming partnerships and task forces, to vaccinate children all over the world. With 400 million children vaccinated each year, the unified cause has led the global number of polio cases to fall by 99% since its creation.

At the height of cases of polio in Africa in 1996, Nelson Mandela united governments against the disease and launched the Kick Polio Out of Africa campaign. Since then, 9 billion doses of the oral polio vaccine have been distributed to children across the continent and after four years of zero recorded cases of wild polio, the African region was declared polio-free on Aug. 25, 2020.

Read the full article about Africa being wild polio-free by Kate Nakamura at Global Citizen.