United Against Cancer v1: Luke Thomas and Zainab Shinkafi-Bagudu on Advancing Childhood Cancer Care

In this episode of United Against Cancer, Luke Thomas, CEO of World Child Cancer, joins host Zainab Shinkafi-Bagudu to discuss the global fight against childhood cancer. Luke shares insights into his extensive international experience in the nonprofit sector, the holistic approach of World Child Cancer, and the importance of collaboration to achieve the 2030 global initiative.

Luke Thomas is the Chief Executive Officer at World Child Cancer. He is also a Board Member at Lepra. Previously, he has served as the Director of Fundraising and Engagement at Multiple Sclerosis International Federation. Additionally he has also served as the Manager of Business Development – Multinationals, at Sightsavers.

Dr. Zainab Shinkafi-Bagudu is a global cancer advocate, a pediatrician, a UICC Board Member,  Founder of the Medicaid Cancer Foundation, and the Chairperson of First Ladies Against Cancer (FLAC). Dr. Bagudu is working with the state ministries of health, education, and women affairs to implement programs to sustainably improve menstrual hygiene, girl-child education, economic empowerment of women, and put an end to gender-based violence. Zainab Shinkafi-Bagudu is a member of the Editorial Board of OncoDaily.

00:00 Recap
01:18 Introduction
02:07 Global Collaboration for Childhood Cancer
03:40 Holistic Approach to Childhood Cancer
05:42 Overcoming Fundraising Challenges
09:36 Connecting Donors to Impact
12:16 Harnessing Data for Survival

Zainab Shinkafi-Bagudu: So a very good morning, afternoon, evening to all our viewers today. My name is Zainab Shinkafi-Bagudu. I’m a child health specialist with a special interest in cancer as it affects women in low, middle-income countries, as well as the disparities that exist and how we can close those care gaps.

Our series United Against Cancer is taking us through the work that various professionals across the world are doing. The very good work, I might add, in the area of cancer control as it affects adults, children, and males, females, everybody. Cancer does not know any boundaries.

It doesn’t discriminate against sex or any other social determinants. Today, I’m going to be having a very nice chat with somebody from my own world, I might add. His name is Mr. Luke Thomas, and he’s the CEO of World Child Cancer, which is one of the foremost childhood organizations, as the name suggests, that is focused on childhood cancer. A lot of people ask me, do children get cancer? Oh, yes, they do. Today, we’re going to be speaking about it.

Not to take the wind out of his sail, I’m going to ask Luke to tell us a little bit out of his very vast experience. Give us some background about your work and your experience, the positions that you occupy, before we delve into the main conversation. Thank you for joining us, fantastic.

Luke Thomas: And it’s such a pleasure to be here. It’s lovely to talk to people, like you say, in our world. I think there’s one of the things that I love about what I do at World Child Cancer and what we do as an organization is the chance to collaborate with experts, organizations around the world.

And I think that, you know, to actually get where we want to be by 2030, you know, with a global initiative, et cetera, those partnerships, those relationships are going to be absolutely vital. So, yeah, it’s a real pleasure to talk to you today. I’ve had the fortune to travel a lot in sub-Saharan Africa, you know, including Nigeria.
And I’ve, you know, been lucky enough to work in international health for many, many years. And I think that for me, it’s one of the, there are probably two things that I think that the world can do and every country can do to improve our lives as a planet.

And that is improve education and improve health.
And I think if we can do those two things, we lift all of ourselves up. And so it’s just great to be part of it. And I’ve been doing this for 20 years, although this is now my first role in the world of childhood cancer.
So still learning a lot in this area.

Zainab Shinkafi-Bagudu: Yes, that’s good to know. And then also, you know, it doesn’t matter if you have been spent in childhood cancer or in other leading organizations for 20 years, you build the experience and the leadership skills that you will bring on board. So what exactly does the World Child Cancer Organization do?

Luke Thomas: Yeah, so we, so we’ve been around since 2007. And really the sort of the key thing for us is about a holistic approach to childhood cancer. Because, you know, we have, we have sort of four pillars to our work, really, which is sort of improving early diagnosis.
And we’ll talk more about this in just a bit. Improving access to treatment, because those various barriers to accessing treatment are enormous in some countries. There’s what we call psychosocial support, which is really all of the elements around those other two areas.

You know, so it’s ensuring that parents and children and healthcare professionals have the care and support they need, and the financial resources they need to actually access, see through treatment, stay in treatment, and actually have good outcomes in the long term.

And then the fourth pillar of our work is around advocacy, because obviously, we can support, you know, hospitals, governments, partners that we work with to deliver and provide those high quality services. But ultimately, you know, it’s our job is to pass on the baton to, you know, so that governments and healthcare ministries, healthcare systems can actually ultimately support and partner with us and pick up the baton when they’re when they’re able to.

Zainab Shinkafi-Bagudu: Excellent. So one thing that struck me in your bio is the fact that you have this vast international experience in the nonprofit sector. And with that comes also closely related to that is the word philanthropy.

And on the back of that is fundraising, and you have a strong background in fundraising and strategy. And the area of philanthropy is constantly evolving, whatever parts of the world you are high, low, middle income, and what do you see as the biggest opportunities and at the same time, the challenges that you have as a child cancer organization in securing the funds that is needed to make this difference that we so desire?

Luke Thomas: Yeah, so I think there’s a couple of things, I think on the on the challenge, I’ll start with the challenges, because I always like to finish on a positive. On the challenges, I think that, you know, there’s a lot of economic uncertainty in the world right now. I think there are very few countries in the world who haven’t been touched by that since, probably since 2020, at the very least, but actually going back to the 2008 financial crash, you know, many countries have never fully recovered from that.

And wealth has not been evenly distributed. And as people have, as the economies have started returning to health, the wealth has not been evenly distributed. And I think that for people to give at whatever level, whether it’s a regular donation of five pounds, or whether it’s, you know, a major donor, people need to feel like they can afford that they can need to feel that they have spare money, I think.

So that economic uncertainty around the world, and all the kind of stuff that’s been going on, it’s a challenge to because to when you have as a fundraiser, you want people to feel confident, you want people to feel wealthy to as much as they can. And you also want them to feel that your issue, the thing that we’re trying to raise money for, is one of the top priorities for them. Because, you know, when you have global wars, or natural disasters, you know, those things that they’re urgent, and they’re present, and they and they attract and that naturally, and correctly, they attract a lot of a lot of attention.

So so we’re competing against a lot of a lot of different sort of challenges at the moment on the on the financial front. That said, on the more on the more positive front. So like I say, it’s always nice to finish on a positive, I think that the thing that really works in our favor is that firstly, childhood cancer is curable.

It is so very curable in comparison to other forms of cancer, even into adult cancers, or to, or to chronic disease, or lots of other things that are actually, you know, really, really challenging to say, this is a curable disease. And we’re talking about children. And I think that those two things that and it’s up to us really, to demonstrate that we can that we’re part of that, you know, we’re actually making that happen every day, you and I are out there saving lives, and that donors, by the very act of giving, are saving lives.

And I think that part of what we do in fundraising is to remove world child cancer from the discussion, because really, we’re a bridge between the donors who want to help and the outcomes for children. So we have one of the things that we’re really working on a lot at the moment is building up a range of strategic partnerships, because the challenges are complex. And we want to have partnerships that really address the complexity of that they don’t just want to solve have one little piece where they can wave their flag and say, we did that.

But they actually recognize that there’s this, there’s an opportunity to make a really big difference over the next, you know, 510 years, and that they can be part of that in a in a really significant way. And I think that we’re pleased to say that, you know, we’re starting to see real interest in that. And we hope that will that will continue.

Zainab Shinkafi-Bagudu: Very interesting approach. So taking away, in a way your own organization, or the name of it and focusing on the course. And I think that is a big lesson for us to take away today, make sure the course is strong enough so that it can appeal to the required donors recognizing the should I say issues that are around that course.

In this particular case, we’re looking at a very wide disparity, especially in low income countries and the level of survivorship, should I say that we see in child cancer, but the mere fact that if they are able to survive, it is curable. That is the light at the end of the tunnel that is such a positive message.

Luke Thomas: Yeah, it’s such a positive message to take to people. And I think when we when I talk about taking ourselves out of the equation, I think that one of the things that the thing I always talk to my fundraising and communications team about is that ultimately, people don’t care about World Child Cancer, they care about the children. So if we can make that donor feel like the impact is as it is as a result of their support.

What an amazing way to connect someone to the cause. And I always say no money, no mission. So donors are just as important to our cause as the as the nurses, as the program managers, as all the kind of different people who play a role.
And it’s really important to make them feel that that is an important part of that.

Zainab Shinkafi-Bagudu: Yes, yes, that’s very interesting. We do a very big walk every October, we focus on all the cancers at the Medicaid Cancer Foundation because of the great need that there is in terms of that way. So the walk is really, it’s a breast cancer month, but it’s dedicated to all the common cancers.

So every year, of course, we do the walk paraphernalia and people are encouraged to buy as a photo as a fundraiser, clearly so that we can support cancer patients. And last year, we had a t-shirt that said this shirt saves lives. We’ve never sold as many kids as that.
It wasn’t about our logo and the colours or anything, it was about the message. And that message really got to people even in a…

Luke Thomas: Just so you know, I’m making a note of this because I’m absolutely going to be stealing this. I’ll pay the copyright fees.

Zainab Shinkafi-Bagudu: It was amazing. The response, I didn’t expect it and the response was so good. So that is really something that we’ve proven and relates to.

So if we can go a little bit more into resource-constrained environments, and you mentioned that you work in different parts of the world, and how do you think that, of course, the level of operation and access to various resources, not just funding, skilled personnel, skilled fundraisers, the computers, the data sets that you can use to access these people differs between high and resource-constrained settings.

And in the course of your work in resource-constrained settings, how do you think organisations like, should I say yours and ours, can work better together to help in bridging the ultimate gap, which is the disparities that we see in childhood cancers, for instance?

Luke Thomas: Yeah, I wish there was a simple answer to this. I think that it is one of the big differences in terms of improved survival rates is the ability to use data, both in terms of, not just in terms of the kind of the work that happens in a hospital, but at what point are children getting to hospital? Are they at stage one, stage two, stage three, stage four?

Because obviously that has a big impact on survival rates once you’re actually in hospital. And registries and better collection and use of data to actually measure the right things will really help us, our partner hospitals and all the countries that we work with to actually make sure that we’re tailoring the services to the needs of, you know, to the unique needs of every population. So that’s something over the course of the next kind of, you know, five to 10 years, that’s something I would dearly love to see.

Because I generally think there’s two factors which ultimately will determine whether we’re going to be successful. And that’s the good use of data. And that’s the best use of expertise, you know, making sure we’re training experts and giving them the right equipment to do their jobs, and then measuring that work effectively.
So we know what works, what doesn’t, and how to keep improving every single day. And I think that’s definitely something that we would dearly love to see more.