Africa is a big issue. I usually hear that Africa will be the future but I’m very certain that Africa is the present. Nothing can happen in this world without Africa. That’s why we think that people should know about the epidemiological transition that is happening in Africa. When we look at the TV, when we read the newspapers we always talk about communicable diseases like malaria, TB, HIV. If you consider the total death from Ebola for over six months now it’s 7,000 deaths. 23,000 – 30,000 people are dying every single day from cancer in Africa. Then if you consider the demographic growth, by the year 2030 70% of the new cancer cases will happen in Africa. So non-communicable disease, including cardiovascular, respiratory problems due to tobacco, diabetes and cancer will be the number one killer in sub-Saharan Africa in the ten coming years.

I think that what we have to do first is to put cancer and NCDs in general on Africa’s health agenda. We need to advocate at the highest level, at the Ministry of Health, at the government, to try to put cancer on the agenda, to put NCDs on the agenda. We hopefully managed to send to the African Union last April 2013 the AORTIC cancer plan to the African Union Health Minister committee. We did the same last February when I presented before the Minister of Health of the Economic Community of West African States the challenges and perspective of cancer in Africa. And I think that’s the way to go. We need to advocate more, we need to raise awareness into the population, we need to think about mammograms, we need to have cancer registries, we need to have more accurate data than we have now to tackle this issue which is definitely, to me, the real threat to Africans instead of sticking on communicable diseases only.

There’s a big training element, a big education drive needed. Who needs to be educated in Africa?

Everybody. Educating people about advocating and in advocacy to have awareness. Educating people for prevention because prevention, to me, is the key. And after prevention those people who have cancer should be diagnosed earlier for early detection, educating people for that. Educating people for treatment and hopefully we are having more and more patients coming in at an early stage so they’re amenable to curative treatment. Those people should be taken care of. And we need to add the specialists in any specialty and for that my preference would be on-site training. Instead of sending African people, doctors, residents to Europe or to the United States and trying to train them in a very different environment and lose some of them because they’re going to stay there, not going back home, my preference would be to organise training regionally. When we bring the experts and you get the equipment we’ll teach once but we will get much more than if we send someone outside. But we need to set up collaborations, collaboration in training, collaboration in research, because where the cases are where the research materials are. But Africa cannot stand as a sample provider, just getting samples, sending to the lab outside. We need to develop meaningful partnerships that will build capacity in Africa.