Announcing the Recipients of Our Cervical Cancer Grants Program for Our 2023-2024 Cycle!

Every year on March 8th, International Women’s Day provides an opportunity to recognize the contributions and achievements of women throughout the world, while also acknowledging the very real need to address issues pertaining to gender inequality and inequity.

At TogetHER for Health, we’re 100% focused on ending cervical cancer, a preventable disease ending the lives of 342,000 women every year, needlessly undermining the stability of families and communities worldwide

TogetHER’s Cervical Cancer Grants Program provides targeted grants designed to generate evidence supporting increased use of improved technologies and strategies to improve vaccination, screening, and early treatment rates in communities across low- and middle-income countries where the disease burden is highest. Our most recent Request for Proposals closed on February 3rd, 2023.

International Women’s Day is a fitting day to announce the newest recipients of our Grants Program, two projects out of many submissions that we believe will have the most profound impact on efforts to save women’s lives from cervical cancer. This cycle’s awardees are Grounds for Health and Women Together Global.

Grounds for Health’s Kenya program is in its early stages of HPV self-sampling program implementation, applying lessons learned and informing program adaptations. The significant shift in approach to screening has affected everything from importation to service delivery. Grounds for Health is carefully monitoring to ensure low rates of loss to follow-up treatment. Success will be measured by ensuring that treatment rates remain above the World Health Organization (WHO) standard of 90%.

With support from the Cervical Cancer Grants Program, Grounds for Health will continue its program implementation using evaluation and adjustment to determine the best approach in achieving high patient satisfaction using an efficient model of service delivery with a high treatment rate. The project seeks to identify best practices in the implementation of HPV testing and treatment programs and promote local and global dissemination of effective models of service provision, specifically in very rural settings where so many women in low- and middle-income countries reside.

Women Together Global’s Cervical Cancer Screening and Prevention project leverages women-lead community networks and resources from the Malawi Ministry of Health in support of Malawi’s National Cervical Cancer Strategic Plan. Women Together Global will mobilize and train women and girls from its target communities in the districts of Mangochi and Mulanje to become Cervical Cancer Navigators, who will educate women and girls in their communities about the risk of cervical cancer and methods of prevention.

This program seeks to increase demand for screening and vaccination while also facilitating access to cervical cancer screening services and HPV vaccines. Working hand-in-hand with local community health workers and district hospital staff, Women Together Global’s Cervical Cancer Navigators will boost adoption of new self-swabbing methods for cervical cancer screening and establish a new role for women as an effective grassroots workforce for improving health in their communities.

Choosing these two projects out of 58 submissions spanning 33 countries was a difficult task for TogetHER’s review team. The massive response to our Request for Proposals shows just how many dedicated programs there are on the front lines engaging in the critical effort to prevent cervical cancer. It also underscores the need for continued investment in global cervical cancer prevention.

Congratulations again to our recipients, and many thanks to all those who responded to our call for proposals. Every organization contributing to cervical cancer elimination is an inspiration to us on this – and every – International Women’s Day.  

Note: Final awards via the Cervical Cancer Grants Program are pending due diligence review by Panorama Global, fiscal sponsor of TogetHER for Health.

Photos courtesy of Grounds for Health and Women Together Global.