The primary objective of an immunization coverage survey is to provide a coverage estimate for selected vaccines or a set of vaccines (fully vaccinated for age) among infants, children, adolescents and/or women of childbearing age, etc. Furthermore, surveys facilitate assessing equity in immunization, by allowing disaggregating coverage by factors such as place of residence, sex, maternal education, economic status or subnational region.

The WHO vaccination coverage survey

The World Health Organization (WHO) provides guidance to Member States, partners agencies and institutions on methods for measuring immunization coverage through surveys. The most recent manual is the 2018 WHO Vaccination Coverage Cluster Survey. A revised version should be available in 2026.

WHO has also developed tools to facilitate the management, analysis, presentation and interpretation of survey. One of these tools, “Vaccination Coverage Quality Indicators (VCQI)” is set of Stata programs intended to be used by statisticians and epidemiologist to analyze survey data; and for programmers to add further modifications and additional analysis indicators. Additional information is available in the VCQI User’s Guide. VCQI, as well as the User's Guide, can be obtained by emailing vpdata@who.int.