Blog

Harold Cottin: How to fundraise for projects on viral hepatitis and cancer

Collage photo of Harold Cottin and Jade Chakowa

Oct 16, 2024, 15:12

Harold Cottin: How to fundraise for projects on viral hepatitis and cancer

Harold Cottin shared on LinkedIn:

“Exchanging tips with my friend Jade Chakowa on how to fundraise for projects on viral hepatitis (for her, at The Hepatitis Fund) and cancer (for me, at City Cancer Challenge) to address current needs. The World Health Summit in Berlin offers that type of connections and exchange of ideas.

Both cancer care and viral hepatitis are fundamentally a challenge in equitable access to prevention, detection and treatment. We have many tools available, but access to them remains limited in low-and-middle income countries. Limited funding to ensure access is a critical barrier to achieving health for all.

Whilst Jade and I share similar challenges, not all are the same :

– Driving change in NCDs and cancer care requires a long-term, system-level approach, that doesn’t fit well with current reporting frameworks used by most donors and inspired by the infectious diseases experience. Some donors like to plan for disease elimination, which is unfortunately not achievable for cancer yet (at the exception of cervical cancer!)

As a result, despite being the world’s largest cause of death, NCDs, including cancer, continue to receive 1–2% of all official development assistance for health. C/Can has the chance to be supported by long-term partners that are convinced by the value of community-led, holistic and sustainable approaches to improve access to cancer care.

– Eliminating viral hepatitis also requires long-term and systems-based thinking, but there is low awareness of the magnitude of hepatitis as a public health issue among the public and governments alike. Hepatitis currently causes 1.3 million deaths a year, similar to tuberculosis, with the death rate continuing to rise.

Yet, hepatitis currently receives only one tenth of the funding compared to HIV, and very few public health donors are willing to move beyond the mainstream philanthropic trends where the focus in infectious diseases remains limited to HIV and tuberculosis. With hepatitis as a leading cause of longer-term health impacts such as liver cirrhosis and liver cancer, The Hepatitis Fund aims to bridge the critical lack of political prioritisation and investments in the shorter-term.

As good friends do, we left our discussion on a mutual promise: let’s raise awareness together on how investments in eliminating hepatitis and controlling cancer today are cost-saving in the long-term as well as saving lives for generations to come.”

Harold Cottin

More posts featuring Harold Cottin on oncodaily.com

Harold Cottin is a Visiting Lecturer in Global Health at Sciences Po and serves as the Head of Global Public Affairs at City Cancer Challenge. Harold Cottin previously worked at Servier as the Director of Public Affairs, Global. He also served as a Junior Expert at ESPON.

Jade Chakowa is the Senior Advisor for Programmes and Partnerships at The Hepatitis Fund, with ten years of experience in global health, development, and humanitarian assistance. Before this role, she led monitoring and evaluation at the City Cancer Challenge Foundation (C/Can) and coordinated humanitarian assistance at UNHCR.