Toward 2030: SIOP Africa adopts the Global Initiative for Childhood Cancer.

Implementation of the World Health Organization (WHO) Global Initiative for Childhood Cancer (GICC) has galvanized efforts to improve childhood cancer services across Africa, by providing the CureAll framework.1 The benefits to being a GICC implementing country are that attention can be focused on identifying needs by convening stakeholders to define shared objectives, increasing the capacity of a country to manage childhood cancer and developing best practices.1 Ghana, Morocco, Senegal, Zambia and Zimbabwe are currently focus countries with South Africa, Mali, Cameroon and Uganda in the early stages of implementation.2 The acronym CureAll highlights the four essential pillars of the framework: 1) adequately staffed Centers of excellence and care networks, 2) Universal health coverage (UHC) 3) context-appropriate treatment and diagnostic Regimens and roadmaps, and 4) Evaluation and monitoring. These pillars are underpinned by cross-cutting foundational enablers: Advocacy, Leveraged financing, and Linked governance.1 The initiative envisions the unification of diverse stakeholders including patients, families, multidisciplinary pediatric oncology teams and governments, to improve pediatric oncology services. In resource-limited settings, strong leadership is essential in applying available tools in innovative ways to achieve these results. Meeting the 2030 target of 60% survival, double the current estimate, can only be achieved by a unified team approach. SIOP Africa has enthusiastically embraced this framework to improve services for children with cancer and achieve its ambitious goals. Assuming a modest age-standardized ratio of 100 cancers per million children under 15 per year, and a population of 1.2 billion with 40% under the age of 15, there are at least 48 000 new cases in Africa annually.3,4 Many go undiagnosed and report low survival rates, therefore overestimate true survival. Current data only reflect outcomes of those who have accessed services.