I welcome the World Health Organization’s Global Status Report on cancer 2026, “The future we choose together”, whose central finding is one we recognise at the Wellbeing Foundation Africa, that the decisive gap in cancer control today lies between what countries plan and what they implement, between strategies on paper and the services that reach women and families.
The report records 20.6 million cancer diagnoses worldwide in 2024, projected to reach 35 million each year by 2050, and finds that 1 in 5 of us will develop cancer while, once the impact on close family is counted, roughly 92% will be touched by the disease at least once, with WHO’s first country-comparable estimates showing five-year breast cancer survival above 85% in high-income countries yet a median of 39% across sub-Saharan Africa, and only 12 countries on course to meet the Sustainable Development Goal 3.4 target of cutting premature cancer mortality by one third by 2030.
As a member of the Astra Zeneca Global Breast Cancer Care Council, I contributed to the Breast Cancer Care Quality Index, aligned with the WHO’s Global Breast Cancer Initiative and its three pillars of early detection, timely diagnosis within sixty days, and treatment completion for at least 80% of patients, working toward reducing breast cancer mortality by 2.5% each year and saving 2.5 million lives by 2040. The Index matters precisely because most countries remain short of that goal, and it is designed for adoption within National Cancer Control Plans, the same policy-to-practice translation the Wellbeing Foundation Africa is demonstrating in Nigeria.
The report calls for three shifts, towards better capabilities, better protections, and better value, and I call on governments to embed cancer control within universal health coverage, to fund National Cancer Control Plans rather than leave them as statements of intent, and to adopt the people-centred approach to prevention, diagnosis and treatment that places those with lived experience at the centre of decisions on their care, because the instruments of progress exist, and what remains is the will to act without delay.
