30 Jan 2026

 Cervical cancer is deceptive. It grows quietly, deep in the body, where the sun does not shine, where no one can see the storm brewing. 

Early stages rarely cause pain or obvious symptoms. And so many women delay screening, telling themselves they will go later.

“Kgang ya teng ha e ntsee sentle gotlhelele,” says Dr Kesegofetse Chabaesele, a family specialist based at Premium Medical Centre in Gaborone. 

Even women with better access to healthcare resources choose to postpone screening, simply because the danger feels distant and invisible, until it is not.  Some, she says delay screening, ‘not out of ignorance, but because life is busy, the process feels uncomfortable and the risk feels abstract’. 

In most cases, by the time the symptoms appear, the disease is often advanced and treatment becomes more aggressive with uncertain outcomes. 

“Lives are forever changed, due to cervical cancer or lost,” she said.

She reiterates that cervical cancer remained the number one cause of cancer-related deaths among women in Botswana.

“This is a fact that should shake us, yet, somehow, it continues to exist on the periphery of national attention,” she says.

While October is drenched in pink for breast cancer awareness, and prostate cancer campaigns enjoy steady visibility despite far lower mortality rates, cervical cancer remains largely unspoken, quiet, overlooked and deadly. She wonders why there are no nationwide urgency around it. 

Why  the corporate world is largely silent as well as reasons laboratories and health stakeholders do not push cervical cancer screening with the same intensity as other cancers? she asks rhetorically. 

Dr Chabaesele says what is painful about cervical cancer is that it disproportionately affects younger women in their 30s and 40s. Most of these women, she says are still building careers, raising children, supporting families and carrying entire households on their backs.

Personally, she reveals that she lost a sister to cervical cancer, who died at the age of 38, who was also a breadwinner. Her illness introduced me to a side of our healthcare system I had never known, from limited access to screening, to treatment delays, to the immense economic strain that comes with prolonged illness, she says.

Another sister, she says survived, adding that survival did not mean restoration. She lived with severe post-radiation complications that affected her quality of life every single day. Her body tells a story of what happens when diagnosis comes late,” she adds.

Dr Chabaesele therefore calls for a collective responsibility, among all women that as part of January goals, they should do a life-saving action; to get cervical cancer screening, a decision, which may save their lives. She points out that in March, her birthday month, she will offer free cervical cancer screening in the village where her sister is buried. 

“It feels right that life-saving action should rise from a place of loss.”

She says her firm intention is to organise healthcare professionals, screening equipment, transport, community mobilisation, awareness materials, funding, partnerships and any contribution, in any shape or form.

“This campaign will be a gift to myself and I hope, a gift to many women.”

Dr Chabaesele is of the view that cervical cancer should not remain a silent emergency, ‘but instead it should be talked about, and it should not be the one we postpone screening for, until it is too late’. BOPA