What Does It Take to Start a Health Movement in Nepal?

Cervical cancer’s greatest risk factor, high-risk HPV, is highly preventable. In fact, the vaccine that prevents 90% of HPV-related cancers has been around for two decades. Yet for women in Nepal, cervical cancer is a significant burden. Stigma around cancer means that people don’t take the preventive action they need to take while it could still save their lives.

That’s why we removed all the barriers we could. Our studies showed that when tests are invasive or lack culturally-tailored support, women don’t take them. So when we took our health clinics mobile, visiting towns and screening women for cervical cancer, our health team knew that just showing up wasn’t going to cut it.

They trained a cohort of Female Community Health Volunteers (FCHV) to get the word out and support women getting tested, gave health camp attendees the option to self-administer their tests to cater to privacy needs, and monitored follow-up rates to measure the effectiveness of the program. And because of this, hundreds of women took action for the first time to protect themselves against cervical cancer.

“We talk a lot about evidence-based care, but what I want to emphasize here is evidence-based health delivery,” said Dr. Binay Shah, Binaytara President and Co-Founder. “What our experience in Neal showed is that this model is effective, operationally simple, and has very high community uptake. A large number of women who tested positive came in for follow-up. That tells you that this kind of program can be adapted across different resource settings.”

Read more about our HPV screening program, spearheaded by the Binaytara Cancer Research Institute, here.

In the coming months, we’re expanding this service with more health volunteers, more testing capacity, and more health camp locations, multiplying the impact exponentially. The movement is just getting started.

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