The Cancer Health Services Research unit (CHSR) of the Ethiopian Organization for Cancer Prevention and Research (CPR – Ethiopia) works on improving value-based cancer services across the care continuum, using real-world outcomes and cost data.
What the unit covers
The unit’s research is interdisciplinary and takes in patient outcomes and patients’ experiences of health services. It also disseminates information on the occurrence, prevention, early detection, treatment, survivorship and economic burden of cancer — the whole path a person takes, rather than the treatment episode alone.
What Ethiopian households pay towards health
Ethiopian health financing figures for 2023 (opens in a new tab) record current health expenditure at US$34.80 a head (WHO Global Health Observatory, indicator GHED_CHE_pc_US_SHA2011), of which 46% was paid out of pocket (GHED_OOPSCHE_SHA2011) — US$16.10 per person. Government health expenditure was US$7.63 a head and external financing US$9.35. The UHC service coverage index stood at 33 in 2023, against 13 in 2000 (UHC_INDEX_REPORTED).
Those are population averages across everyone, most of whom are not being treated for cancer in a given year. What a cancer-affected household actually pays — the biopsy, the pathology, a course of radiotherapy, the travel to reach a centre — is measured from patients rather than assembled from national accounts. It is one of the three things this unit is set up to collect.
Capacity, as recorded
Radiotherapy units stood at 0.09 per million population in 2021 (indicator DEVICES22), against an Ethiopian population estimated at about 132 million in 2024. Cancer surgery, radiotherapy, pathology laboratories, an operational cancer plan and oral morphine were reported available in the public sector in that year; palliative care was reported unavailable in primary health care and in community settings. In 2024 there were 20,593 medical doctors, 1.56 per 10,000 population (HWF_0001), and 143,270 nursing and midwifery personnel, 10.85 per 10,000 (HWF_0006).
Survival and stage at diagnosis
WHO AFRO recorded in November 2025 that more than 80% of Ethiopian cervical cancer cases are diagnosed at an advanced stage, on cases reaching a facility. Stage at diagnosis is the point in the pathway where a health service can act, which is why it sits at the centre of this unit’s work.
Two survival records exist for Ethiopia, and they are different objects. WHO’s Global Health Observatory carries a modelled five-year net breast cancer survival value under indicator CANCERSURVIVAL_BREASTCANCER, for the diagnosis window 2017–2021 rather than a calendar year, with an uncertainty interval spanning 38 percentage points; the same indicator returns a value for every one of the 47 member states of the WHO African Region. IARC’s SURVCAN-3 holds a contribution from the Addis Ababa registry — a single-city, hospital-linked series, delivered inside a web application.
The registry question
Ethiopia reported to WHO in 2021 that it operates a population-based cancer registry (indicator NCD_CCS_PBCR). IARC’s Cancer Incidence in Five Continents and Cancer Over Time give a different account of Ethiopian registration. The disagreement bears directly on this unit’s work, because it determines what any outcome measurement can be anchored to.
The consequence for the numbers is the same either way. Ethiopia’s estimated burden for 2024 was 79,239 new cases and 46,841 deaths (opens in a new tab), with 142,431 people alive within five years of a diagnosis. Incidence is extrapolated from a subnational registry and mortality is modelled from incidence.
The measurements this unit exists to make
Patient-reported outcomes, patients’ experience of services, and household costs are collected from patients rather than assembled from routine systems. That is what makes them measurable in Ethiopia directly, whatever the registry position, and it is why those three sit at the top of the unit’s programme.
Working with the unit
Proposals for joint work are covered on the collaborate page. Enquiries to cancer.prev.ethio@gmail.com or +251 92 012 4183.