Commemorating 3 years of global collaboration with survivors, leaders, and advocates towards the elimination of cervical cancer
On Friday 17 November 2023
07:00 in New York │13:00 in Brazzaville │13:00 in Geneva │17:30 in New Delhi
Join us
Background
In 2018, the World Health Organization’s Director-General, Dr Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, issued a call to action to scale up prevention, detection, and treatment, and called on the world to eliminate cervical cancer as a public health problem. In 2020, WHO’s Member States responded to the call, passing a historic resolution through the World Health Assembly resolution WHA73.2 adopted the Global strategy to accelerate the elimination of cervical cancer as a public health problem and its associated targets accountability to keep the world on track to 2030 and beyond.
On 17 November 2020, WHO launched the strategy to celebrate the global commitment and annual progress on the pathway to elimination and achieving the threshold of fewer than 4 women per 100 000 women–years.
Since the launch, political will to meet the strategy’s targets is evidenced in the development and launch of elimination strategies in all 6 WHO regions. We have seen early results in the 3 pillars:
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HPV vaccination coverage: 90% of girls fully vaccinated with the HPV vaccine by the age of 15;
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70% of women screened using a high-performance test by the age of 35, and again by the age of 45; and,
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access to treatment: 90% of women with pre-cancer treated and 90% of women with invasive cancer managed.
The 17 November 2023 day of action is an opportunity for us to reflect, take stock and refocus on scaling up implementation in all WHO regions and celebrate country successes with implementing partners, including those with lived experience, to share early learnings and showcase progress of successful partnerships and innovative models of care that are shaping the scale up of services across each of the 3 strategic pillars.
Objectives
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Celebrate, advocate, and raise awareness.
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Take stock of progress, highlight innovative approaches.
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Identify persistent gaps, challenges, specific needs for technical assistance/support.
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Strengthen strategic partnerships and collaborative efforts based on country needs.
Expected outcomes
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Country success reports to bring renewed momentum to national implementation efforts.
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Women's stories to highlight the lived experiences.
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Showcase strong implementation partnerships to foster building of strategic partnerships.
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Highlights national implementation success to inspire country elimination roadmaps.