Giving Compass' Take:

• Angeline Mutunga shares how the death of her best friend's mother prompted her to start educating women in her Kenyan community about cervical cancer, saving her mother's best friend. 

• How can funders work to identify and support grassroots efforts like this one? How can funders move the needle on cervical cancer globally? 

• Learn about funding global health


This is a story about my best friend’s mother and my mother’s best friend. One died from cervical cancer. One survived.

They lived in the same rural Kenyan village where I grew up. No one there ever talked about the disease, which killed 311,365 women globally last year, the majority living in communities across Africa and Asia. No one knew it was caused by a common virus, HPV, that is preventable—or that when detected early, it’s easily treatable. Women who went to the clinic—or even to a hospital—never were asked when they last had a Pap test or any kind of screening. When they suffered symptoms, they wrongly blamed less stigmatized conditions like diabetes and high blood pressure, or some bad omen.

After my friend’s mother died, I helped organize a group of my mother’s friends at our house. My aim: to mobilize local women around a disease that might be affecting them even if they were feeling fine. Now that early detection and treatment can be provided where women live—at local health facilities and sites where they receive care for HIV, and even in their own homes—it’s time for country leaders, donors and civil society stakeholders to support HPV vaccine scale-up for all girls, and to accelerate screening and treatment options for middle-aged women, whose health needs have been long neglected.

My mother’s best friend Sabina was one of 15 women in that informal club diagnosed with cervical cancer. Caught an early stage, she was treated and now is cancer-free. But the global trend of this disease is trending upward. We can reverse that, though. Sabina’s granddaughter, one of 1.8 billion young people in the world today, has a good chance of escaping the disease altogether.

Why? New prevention, screening and treatment tools—namely, a vaccine, artificial intelligence, self-testing and a battery-powered treatment device. Those, along with a push by the WHO to eliminate cervical cancer, should mean better health for girls and women everywhere, even in Kenya’s most remote villages.

Read the full article about preventing cervical cancer by Angeline Mutunga and Celina Schocken at Global Health NOW.