Transform health in a Kenyan slum with just $26

Founded from a mere $26, The Tabitha Medical Clinic has now scaled up the clinic’s services to the community through cervical cancer screening using VIA.

Preventable Deaths

Despite the wide variation in access to care and screening services for cervical cancer evident in the health system in Kenya, the Carolina for Kibera through its health service opened doors at Tabitha clinic for cervical cancer screening.

Tabitha clinic is now undertaking cervical cancer screening to all women of reproductive age in the community for prevention, early diagnosis, and treatment. We also provide education on cervical cancer to ensure that more women know about the benefits of early detection and can participate in cancer control and prevention.

Launched in December 2012, also targeting highest-risk HIV-infected women, the program has cumulatively provided the services to up to 70 women.

Each woman is counted and counts. Every woman merits the opportunity to avoid cervical cancer, no matter where she lives.

Carolina for Kibera has responded to a significant need in Kibera, a resource-limited setting where healthcare funding and infrastructure are inadequate for primary care and prevention programs like cervical cancer screenings, and women are, as a result, significantly more vulnerable.  The program encourages women to be screened and to have pap tests conducted based on VIA results through referral.

The Carolina for Kibera Cervical Cancer Screening Program supports women and healthcare providers to help ensure that as many women as possible benefit from cervical cancer screening. It also works to dispel the previously-held idea that such services are only available in big hospitals and come at a cost.

A large number of women in the community never get to be screened for cervical cancer—whether it is because of day-long work/business or local myths and fears about cervical screening. However, no woman in Kibera ought to die of cervical cancer, a disease said to develop slowly after initial infection and, unlike most other cancers, to be preventable when precursor lesions are detected and treated. This is what CFK, through its Health Service Department, stands for through this noble program, and we are proud to be developing workable strategies to see that all women have access these services.