Cervical and Cervical Cancer in Focus: A Cross-Continental Fight Led by Movement Health Foundation

The South African

4 days ago

In the Lambayeque region of northern Peru, stories of delay and loss echo quietly through generations. They are not captured in photographs or archived in official records, but live in the memories of families who have waited too long for care that never came soon enough. In distant towns and rural communities, the journey to a clinic can take hours, and even then, the tools needed for screening are often out of reach.
In South Africa, across the ocean but bound by the same fate, women in Limpopo and KwaZulu-Natal wait—not for doctors, but for answers. The nearest hospital is 60 kilometres away. Transport costs nearly a third of their monthly income. And so, they wait—not just for diagnoses, but for the right to be heard.
In these places, cancer is not simply a medical condition.
It is the result of geography, of poverty, of a history written without their names. More often than not, it is an inheritance.
The fight against it—especially breast and cervical cancer—demands more than science. It demands justice.
The cost of delay is not just time. It's lives.
Globally, breast cancer is the most commonly diagnosed cancer among women. Cervical cancer is the most preventable. And yet, they continue to take the lives of women in low- and middle-income countries at staggering rates. In South Africa, cervical cancer is responsible for more cancer-related deaths among women than any other type. In Peru, more than 4,000 women were diagnosed with the disease last year—many of them poor, and a disproportionate number Indigenous or Afroperuvian. Too many were diagnosed late, reflecting persistent gaps in early screening and access to timely care.
To delay care is to decide who is worthy of survival. In both countries, early screening remains rare, while advanced-stage diagnoses are the norm. In Peru, screening levels for cervical cancer plummeted by 76% during the pandemic. In South Africa, 75% of cervical cancer cases are detected only after the disease has progressed beyond early intervention. And in the townships and rural provinces, where HIV prevalence is high and stigma travels faster than treatment, those odds worsen by the day.
The Movement Health Foundation operates outside the spotlight. Instead, it works through local institutions, public clinics, and digital infrastructure, where change is measured not in headlines but in wait times shortened and referrals completed.
With the Clinton Global Initiative as its commitment partner, the Foundation is now leading cancer interventions in Peru and South Africa that are designed not just to treat, but to reimagine the system itself. In South Africa, a Progressive Web App developed with Nelson Mandela University is helping women navigate cervical cancer screening—from understanding symptoms, to locating clinics, to preparing for appointments in their home language. The app includes voice input, offline features, and maps for rural areas.
In Peru, the model is different, but the need is the same. A workflow coordination tool—originally piloted for maternal health in Cusco—is being adapted to help local clinics track screenings and patient referrals for breast and cervical cancer. The new program, under development in Lambayeque and Arequipa, targets 170,000 women and is built to scale to additional regions by 2026.
The legacy of inequality cannot be fixed by apps alone. The question is whether these digital tools are surface patches or the beginning of deeper structural reform.
Under new executive director Bogi Eliasen, the Foundation is positioning itself as a bridge between the technological and the political. 'We are not interested in pilots that fade,' Eliasen has said. 'We are building infrastructure that learns, adapts, and becomes public.'
It's a bold vision in an industry littered with failed interventions and pilots that collapsed under the weight of poor implementation or vanished when donor funding dried up. But the Movement Health Foundation insists that local partnership, government integration, and community buy-in are non-negotiable.
The work in Peru, for example, is embedded within national health policy timelines and budget cycles. In South Africa, the Foundation's collaboration with local institutions is explicit, not adjacent. This is how institutions gain roots—not through speed, but through alignment.
The numbers should make us uncomfortable. In 2021, South Africa recorded 356.86 DALYs per 100,000 women for breast cancer—a steep increase from 196.28 in 1990. DALYs measure years of life lost not just from death, but from living with disease. These are years spent in waiting rooms, in silence, in systems that never called your name.
Peru fares no better. In rural areas, Indigenous and Afroperuvian women often learn about cancer from other patients, not their doctors. The clinics are centralised, the health literacy campaigns are underfunded, and the result is predictable: women show up too late, and leave too soon.
We are not talking about rare conditions. We are talking about preventable diseases with known interventions. The delay is not technical. It is the result of fragile policies and outdated processes, systems that have failed to evolve with the needs of those they serve.
A woman in rural South Africa still needs to travel hours to reach care. A woman in northern Peru still needs three separate visits to complete a screening, colposcopy, and treatment. If she misses one, the clock resets. This is not a coincidence. It is a reflection of design—of systems built to be good enough for some, but not for all.
And yet, that design is not immutable. It can be rewritten.
The Movement Health Foundation is trying to write a different script. One where prevention is not a privilege, where follow-up is not optional, and where a diagnosis is not the beginning of the end.
If global health is to mean anything, it must begin with the least protected. Not just in rhetoric, but in protocol. Not just in fundraising, but in follow-through.
And so the question remains, not for them, but for us: what does it say about our global priorities when a woman needs to survive a system before she can survive a disease?
'This is not about awareness,' Bogi Eliasen has said. 'This is about consequence.'
He's right. The numbers are not just statistics. They are verdicts. And verdicts, if left unchallenged, become legacies.
Let's not allow that.
By: Lena Whitmere