CANCaRe Africa shared on LinkedIn:
“Three inspiring, productive days in Jimma, Ethiopia!
Today marks the end of our Zero Abandonment working meeting. We made the most of our time together: sharing experiences, learning from each other, developing ideas and working on concrete plans for the next phase.
Together, we are building a collaborative platform to support families of children with cancer across Africa, helping them overcome financial barriers and complete their child’s treatment. A key focus is reducing out-of-pocket costs through unconditional cash transfers.
We believe that by working together, sharing evidence and building on each other’s experiences, we can make a real difference.
Would you like to join us? We welcome partners and colleagues who share this ambition and would like to contribute.
Please email us at cancareafrica@gmail.com.”
About Zero Abandonment
The Zero Abandonment initiative in Ethiopia, led by CANCaRe Africa (the Collaboration for Evidence and Research in Care of Childhood Cancer in Africa), is a targeted clinical and public health effort focused on eliminating treatment abandonment among children diagnosed with cancer.
In low- and middle-income countries (LMICs), treatment abandonment – defined as a patient failing to return for planned protocol therapy for 4 consecutive weeks or longer – is one of the single greatest contributors to avoidable childhood cancer mortality. Even when effective chemotherapy, surgery, and supportive care protocols are available at tertiary medical centers such as Jimma University Medical Center in Ethiopia, families face severe structural barriers, including:
- Catastrophic Out-of-Pocket Expenses: Costs associated with travel, temporary lodging near referral centers, and lost daily wages for working parents.
- Geographic Isolation: Multi-day journeys from rural agrarian regions to central specialized oncology facilities.
- Information Asymmetry and Stigma: Misconceptions surrounding the curability of pediatric malignancies, often leading to reliance on non-medical alternatives when early treatment side effects appear.
Without targeted supportive infrastructure, these factors result in high rates of therapy discontinuation, converting potentially curable oncological diagnoses into fatal outcomes.
You can also read: Research, Advocacy and Implementation at the Zero Abandonment Workshop – CANCaRe Africa.