The overarching objective of this project is to develop a sustainable and reliable assessment of the impact of HPV vaccination across low- and middle-income countries. Local evidence is essential to inform context-specific cervical cancer control policies and to ensure the comparability of programmes across countries and populations and over time.
To reach this objective, IARC/WHO, in Lyon, is setting up a Center of Excellence to measure age- and type-specific HPV prevalence and assess local population-based HPV vaccination impact.
Building on IARC’s and partners’ extensive international experience in conducting similar studies, the Center of Excellence is developing standardized and exportable procedures to plan, prepare, conduct, monitor, and analyse findings from cross-sectional HPV prevalence surveys in women from selected populations in resource-limited settings.
These surveys will be designed to monitor the population-level impact of HPV vaccination (objective 1).
The necessary skills and tools to perform the different phases of the cross-sectional surveys will then be transferred to local personnel from partner institutions through training (objective 2).
The corresponding fieldwork will then be monitored by the Center of Excellence to ensure adequate quality standards, and finally the collection of acquired data will be centralized to allow for comprehensive, transparent, and standardized data analyses (objective 3).
To achieve the above-mentioned objectives, the activities of the project are distributed across the following Work Packages (WPs):