WHY WE EXIST
98% of women and men who are diagnosed late of cancer symptoms do not survive in rural Africa. This is as a result of many factors such as the lack awareness, inadequate funds for early diagnosis and treatment facilities. The high level of ignorance and lack of awareness contributes to the negative stigmatisation, cultural beliefs and religious ideologies challenging cancer in Africa.
OUR PRIMARY OBJECTIVE
- Provide access to definitive cancer diagnosis/testing.
- Develop population-based cancer data to serve as a foundation for both local and national cancer control plans & policies.
- Provide acess to a High-quality cancer information to the local people.
Our Key Result Indicators:
- A reduction in the rate of late cancer diagnosis and mortalities.
- An increase in health literacy regarding cancer risk factors and symptoms.
- An increase in footfalls to our cancer health centre.
What we do now.
- We provide door to door medical checks.
- We fund local medical treatments.
- We keep records regularly to help monitor the community.
How we do it.
- We employ trained medical professionals locally.
- We partner with medical institutions on larger programs.
- We collaborate with organisations and government bodies to execute health programs and allocate grants for treatments.
We Welcome Volunteers.
We believe that by engaging volunteers, both medical and non-medical, to work in collaboration with health departments, we can create a sustainable service. Furthermore, reducing cancer in Africa can be more effective through collective collaborations.
we continue to ensure that we:
- Help the local people manage the impact of living with cancer.
- Our nurses visit families six days a week, giving them comfort and reassurances.
- Share information to help reduce anxiety and stigmatization.
- Support families living with cancer
Short-Term Targets – Restructure to Community centre.
By the end of 2017 and early 2018, we had provided our services to over 15,897 people across Nigeria, Kenya and South Africa. Although our services were well received and effective for the short term, we realised that in order to make a significant impact and sustainable support, we needed to build a cancer centre of excellence where we could control the quality of services provided, effectively manage the funds allocated and the medications issued.
Therefore, we decided to streamline our services to a local community until the centre is completed and then model it across other African countries.
Everyday we talk to people in rural Africa about detecting cancer early.
There are so many people dying from cancer in Africa. Receiving a cancer diagnosis is an extremely difficult time and affect many aspects of someone’s life. Especially with the very high cost of treating Cancer in Africa.
Since 2011, our local health workers have regularly visited more than two thousand homes screening and advising people who may be affected by cancer. Cancel Cancer Africa’s motivation is for everyone in rural Africa to receive the best cancer information there is to catch it early. We are working one small community at a time.
We currently operate in Nigeria and Kenya.
Ronnie Jacobs was born in Birmingham, England and his parents are from a rural village in Edo State, Nigeria. His father died of prostate cancer in 2010. Making his mother a widow, depriving her of a loving husband of over 40 years of marriage and the chance of his father playing with all his lovely grandchildren.
His father never told anyone about his early symptoms and kept his illness until he died a secret. It was a sad loss, but it was made worse when the children eventually found out why he died, which could have been easily prevented. This pain led Ronnie to set up a local charity in Nigeria (Lift Above Cancer) and Cancel Cancer Africa in the UK to help raise cancer awareness in rural communities in Africa.
“My passion is to build a free community health centre that will contribute to improving early detection of cancer symptoms to help the local people”
One in eight men will be diagnosed with prostate cancer during their lifetime and it is the second leading cause of cancer death in men in Africa. The rate of late presentations of Cancer symptoms in rural Africa is the number one reason why the number of people dying from cancer is very high in rural Africa. Most countries in Africa do not have the facilities to care for Cancer patients. Imagine a country of over 60 million people with just one government MRI. Many poor women live in rural villages need to travel hundreds of kilometres to the city capital hospital with the hope that they will be attended to.