We run our research programme through units covering behaviour, health services and tobacco control. We also award research grants and fellowships from time to time to early career scientists with novel hypotheses for prevention and early detection.
The units
Behavioural Research Unit (BRET) — the best ways to prevent or reduce behaviours that increase cancer risk, and to support participation in evidence-based screening. Priorities run across the cancer control continuum from prevention to end-of-life care, and include basic behavioural and psychological science, interventions in tobacco use and in diet and energy balance, communication and informatics, and surveillance of the public’s use of cancer information.
Cancer Health Services Research (CHSR) — improving value-based cancer services across the care continuum using real-world outcomes and cost data. The unit’s work is interdisciplinary, covering patient outcomes and patients’ experiences of health services, and it disseminates information on the occurrence, prevention, early detection, treatment, survivorship and economic burden of cancer.
Tobacco Control Research (TCR) — research and evidence dissemination to prevent, treat and control tobacco use. Example projects include epidemiology and surveillance of tobacco knowledge, attitudes and behaviour; Compliance with and Enforcement of Anti-Smoking policies in Ethiopia, the CEASE project; and the aetiology, predictors, correlates and determinants of tobacco use, nicotine dependence and cessation.
The evidence base the units work in
Ethiopia’s estimated cancer burden for 2024 was 79,239 new cases and 46,841 deaths (opens in a new tab), with breast, cervical and colorectal cancers the three most commonly diagnosed. Which cancers are commonest is what tells a prevention programme where to start.
Those are estimates rather than counts. Incidence is extrapolated from partial subnational registration, and mortality is modelled from incidence. Ethiopia reported to WHO in 2021 that it operates a population-based cancer registry (Global Health Observatory, indicator NCD_CCS_PBCR); IARC’s long-run registry series, Cancer Incidence in Five Continents and Cancer Over Time, give a different account of Ethiopian registration.
Ethiopia ran a full national adult tobacco survey in 2024 and presented the findings at a forum in Addis Ababa in April 2025. Five prevalence figures from that survey are carried in the WHO Global Health Observatory, and datasets from national NCD surveys are catalogued in the WHO NCD Microdata Repository (opens in a new tab).
Where two sources give different figures
WHO estimated HPV vaccination coverage among Ethiopian girls aged 9–14 at 51% for 2025 (Global Health Observatory, indicator SDGHPVRECEIVED); Ethiopia’s own administrative reporting recorded female coverage between 90% and 94% for 2019 to 2023. Both sit within WHO systems and they differ by around forty points. The difference between what a country reports and what WHO estimates is itself a research question, and it is the kind of question these units take on.
Also on these pages
Publications covers what we have published and where it appears. Grants and fellowships covers awards to early career scientists. Collaborate sets out how to propose joint work.