Ayodeji Ake
Rotary International President-elect, Olayinka Hakeem Babalola, has reaffirmed the global service organisation’s commitment to eradicating polio, insisting that financial challenges confronting health interventions worldwide would not derail efforts to rid the world of the disease.
Speaking during his address to Rotarians ahead of formally assuming office as President of Rotary International, Babalola declared that Rotary would remain steadfast in its decades-long campaign against polio until the disease is completely eradicated.
“We must keep our most important commitment: We will eradicate polio,” he said.
Highlighting progress being made in some of the most difficult environments, Babalola pointed to recent innovations in Afghanistan, where health workers are deploying needle-free jet injectors to vaccinate children in communities previously resistant to immunisation programmes.
“In Afghanistan, medical workers are now using needle-free jet injectors to vaccinate children in communities where fear and distrust once kept families away, and it is working. Innovation is helping us reach the unreachable,” he said.
The Rotary president-elect, however, warned against complacency, noting that global funding for health programmes was coming under increasing pressure.
“But we cannot rest now. Funding is under pressure globally. This is precisely the moment Rotary must hold firm. Every child protected is one step closer to a promise kept to every family in the world that will never have to know this disease,” he stated.
Babalola said Rotary’s mission extends beyond delivering projects and interventions, stressing that the organisation is focused on creating lasting and measurable impact in communities around the world.
According to him, Rotary’s new call to action, “Create Lasting Impact”, challenges members to think beyond immediate outcomes and focus on sustainable change.
“In Rotary, we give members a place to belong. We help keep students in school. We organise vaccination campaigns that protect children. These results are real, and they matter deeply. But to create lasting impact asks a harder question: What happens next?” he said.
The incoming Rotary leader explained that lasting impact means measuring not only activities undertaken but also the enduring transformation they bring about.
“We turn friendships into lifelong bonds. We help each other change for the better. And we measure not just what we did but what changed and whether that change will endure,” he said.
Babalola also used the occasion to underscore Rotary’s commitment to peacebuilding, describing peace as a deliberate objective rather than an accidental consequence of development programmes.
“Peace must be deliberately pursued. It must be built into the design of what we do, not assumed as a by-product,” he said.
Citing Rotary’s Pathways to Peace and Prosperity initiative in Colombia, he noted that the programme is helping communities affected by decades of armed conflict, poverty and displacement through leadership training, conflict resolution and economic empowerment.
“That is what deliberate peacebuilding looks like. And that is the standard I am calling all of us to bring to our work this year,” he said.
Reflecting on his more than four decades in Rotary, Babalola recounted how a literacy project he participated in as a young Rotaractor transformed his outlook on service.
“I watched a woman hold a piece of paper and read her own name for the first time. That moment redirected me. I was not simply a young man with opportunities anymore. I was a young man with a responsibility to extend those opportunities to others,” he recalled.
He urged Rotarians around the world to continue building a legacy of service, peace and hope, insisting that Rotary’s greatest achievements lie not only in projects completed but in lives transformed.
