UICC has made great progress in the last two years. We were able to redefine our purpose – why do we have UICC and what are we about to do? Our purpose is to unite the cancer community to do three things: to lower the global burden of cancer; to promote greater equity in cancer control and to make sure that the cancer has its right place on the global health and development agenda. We were very lucky to have the entire board of directors support the purpose statement and develop a long-term strategy to enable the delivery on this purpose.

We also articulated our ambitions. We want to be the global membership organisation uniting all the cancer stakeholders in the world but also including other sectors of healthcare and outside health, realising that we need broad based multi-sector partnerships to deliver. We also want to have many more members; the target for the next few years is a thousand member organisation and going further. We articulated the three main pillars for our long-term strategy. One of them would be to mobilise global resources to make sure that we are the source of the templates and guidelines that we produce, global public goods, for the world to use; to do knowledge synthesis of existing knowledge; to stimulate data collection; to stimulate research.

The second big pillar is to measure the progress and stimulate action. So our work together with our partners, especially with IARC to gather the data to necessarily evidence and then make sure that it’s used for action to reduce the global burden of cancer. Stimulating this knowledge would include doing some kind of annual state of cancer report, holding the other agency world accountable and holding ourselves accountable for measuring the progress against really crunchy metrics and specific targets.

The third big pillar is to inspire movement. We realise that it’s not enough to have evidence, not enough to have knowledge and good will but you actually have to inspire movement. That means getting more members, that means developing a young leaders’ programme, engaging young people, that means engaging our partners in industry, partners in governments, partners in NCD Alliance, partners in other sectors and then making sure that we have a very loud voice and, as Stephen Lewis told us in the plenary session today, be less polite about stimulating progress in cancer control.