• Written by: admin
• October 5, 2026

Cancer research decides what care Tanzanian patients get

Every treatment protocol, screening age and referral rule started as a study somewhere. The question worth asking is where that study was done, and on whom.

Besta Health Foundation’s fourth programme pillar is cancer research and innovation — working with hospitals, universities, researchers and development partners to produce evidence that reflects Tanzanian patients rather than borrowed assumptions about them.

Why numbers about African cancer are mostly estimates

Start with an uncomfortable fact. Most published figures about cancer in Africa are modelled, not counted.

GLOBOCAN 2020 drew on 43 cancer registries across 31 sub-Saharan African countries. Of the 24 population-based registries among them, only five had national coverage — 18 covered a single city, one a province. Assessed against a standard 15-point quality framework, the three best-performing registries met just 9 of 15 criteria. The researchers who ran that appraisal concluded that coverage and quality “remain poor” and that GLOBOCAN estimates should be used “with caution when allocating resources.”

Read that last phrase again. The numbers governments use to decide where cancer money goes come with a warning label attached.

The cancer research gap runs the same way. Africa carries roughly 25% of the global disease burden, yet a review of 2,472 randomised controlled trials published in eight major medical journals between 2019 and 2024 found only 3.9% were conducted exclusively in Africa — and most of those studied infectious disease, not cancer or other non-communicable conditions.

So the treatment guidelines that reach a clinic in Dar es Salaam were largely built on patients who were not Tanzanian, in health systems that look nothing like this one. Sometimes that transfers cleanly. Often it does not, because the questions that matter here — how far patients travel, what they can pay, when they present, what they believe about cancer — were never among the study variables.

Cancer research done locally is how that gets corrected. Not as an academic exercise. As the difference between a policy built on a guess and one built on a count.

What cancer research at BHF covers

BHF works with healthcare institutions, universities, researchers and development partners across three kinds of cancer research, each answering a different sort of question.

The subject areas span the whole patient journey:

• Cancer prevention
• Early detection and screening
• Diagnosis
• Treatment
• Survivorship
• Palliative care

That last item is worth pausing on. Palliative care is chronically under-researched everywhere, and in a country where the WHO has reported that roughly 90% of patients arrive at the main referral centre with advanced disease, evidence on how to relieve suffering well is not a secondary concern.

The Foundation’s stated aim for this cancer research work is threefold: inform policy, improve clinical practice, and support solutions that are sustainable and patient-centred.

Sustainable is the operative word. A study that produces a finding nobody can afford to act on has described a problem rather than solved one.

The unglamorous research that changes the most

Ask most people what cancer research means and they picture a laboratory. New drugs. Genomic sequencing. Trials of things that do not exist yet.

That work matters, and Tanzania is not where most of it will happen. The research that will move outcomes here is quieter and cheaper, and it looks like this:

• Why do patients who start chemotherapy stop before finishing the course?
• What actually happens between a district clinic noticing a lump and a patient reaching an oncologist?
• Which community screening approach finds the most disease per shilling spent?
• What do patients and families believe about cancer, and which of those beliefs delays them?

None of these needs a laboratory. All of them need somebody to collect the data properly and publish what it says.

Besta Health Foundation is unusually well placed for exactly this kind of cancer research, because it already sits on the ground where the answers are. The Foundation has supported 350+ patients, run 5+ community screening outreaches, and reached 8,000+ community members with awareness work. Every one of those interactions generates information about who comes forward, who does not, what stops treatment, and what keeps it going.

That is a dataset most researchers have to spend years building. BHF generates it as a by-product of its patient care work.

Turning it into published evidence is the step that makes it useful to somebody other than BHF — a district hospital in Mbeya, a ministry official setting screening policy, another foundation deciding where to start.

Who the Foundation does this work with

No small organisation produces credible cancer research alone. Study design, ethics approval, statistical analysis and peer review all need people who do that work full time.

BHF’s approach is partnership. It collaborates with:

• Healthcare institutions — including Besta Hospital, its founding partner, and referral centres such as Ocean Road Cancer Institute and Muhimbili National Hospital
• Universities and academic researchers — who bring methodology, supervision and publication routes
• Development partners and fellow foundations — including Shujaa Cancer Foundation and Associazione Ruvuma Onlus
• Government institutions — the eventual users of anything the research recommends

Each side brings what the other lacks. Universities have method and rigour but often struggle for community access and patient reach. BHF has both, plus a standing relationship with patients who trust it.

The Foundation’s own constitution commits it to undertaking research, evaluations and studies to support evidence-based advocacy and sound health policy. That phrase — evidence-based advocacy — is the connection between this pillar and everything else BHF does. Advocacy without evidence is opinion. With it, it becomes a case a ministry can act on.

Knowledge exchange runs alongside the studies themselves, through the Foundation’s training and capacity building work, so findings reach the people treating patients rather than stopping at a journal.

Turning evidence into policy by 2030

BHF’s cancer research pillar is the newest of its programmes, and the Foundation is candid that it is being built rather than already finished. The targets give the shape of it.

Those first two rows are what this article is about, and they feed the three below them. A study that shows which screening method finds the most disease changes how the 100,000 get screened. A study on treatment drop-out changes how the 5,000 get supported.

Cancer research is also the slowest-paying thing a foundation can fund. There is no photograph of a patient receiving a study. The return arrives years later, in decisions made better by people who may never know where the evidence came from.

That is exactly why it needs deliberate funding rather than leftovers.

If you want to strengthen cancer research in Tanzania, there are three routes. Partner with us if you are a university, hospital or research institution looking for community reach and patient-level insight. Donate to fund data collection, analysis and publication costs. Or get in touch if you are a researcher with a question worth answering here.

Besta Health Foundation is a registered non-governmental organisation (Registration No. 00NGO/R/7951), established 3 January 2025 under the Non-Governmental Organizations Act, 2002. Head office: Tunisia Road, Ada Estate, Kinondoni, Dar es Salaam. P.O. Box 5596.

Sources: Appraisal of sub-Saharan African cancer registry data submitted to GLOBOCAN 2020 · University of Glasgow on African representation in clinical trials · WHO on cancer treatment in Dar es Salaam