2026 Dicey Scroggins Distinguished Advocate Award: Tata Mayaah Eveline
Since 2016, Tata Mayaah Eveline, Founder and Executive Director of Humanity at Heart International Association, has been reshaping what cancer care looks like for women in Cameroon. Confronting a harsh reality — a survival rate for breast and cervical cancer as low as 25% — she rejected the idea that clinics should simply wait for patients to arrive. Instead, she brought the clinic to the community, building a Full Continuum of Care model that pairs education and proactive screening with meticulous, community-led patient navigation. Over the past eight years, Eveline and her team have navigated more than 1,000 women through a fragmented healthcare system, ensuring no one is lost to follow-up between a suspicious finding and survivorship, while dismantling the stigma that so often delays care until it’s too late.

What sets Eveline apart is her ability to scale grassroots impact into systemic change. She is currently advocating for her Hybrid Patient Navigation Model to be integrated into Cameroon’s National Cancer Control Strategic Plan, and for patient navigation itself to become a recognized profession taught in school curricula. Her leadership extends well beyond Cameroon’s borders through the African Cervical Health Alliance, Voices of Impact for Cancer Equity, UICC’s Patient Group Mentorship Program, and the American Cancer Society’s BEACON community. Tata Mayaah Eveline embodies the spirit of the IGCS Distinguished Advocacy Award: she is the human bridge between a screening test and a successful treatment outcome, a reformer building a sustainable blueprint for low-resource settings worldwide, and a lifeline for the women and families she serves.

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