In Sub-Saharan African countries, cancer is significantly more deadly than in other countries with more developed healthcare infrastructures. There are approximately 626,000 new cases of cancer per year. 448,000 individuals die of cancer every year.

Given the dire situation, Harvard Medical School's "Global Health Catalyst" team wanted to create a strategy to reduce the cancer burden. Harvard partnered with IBM to collaborate on a 3-week intensive effort to conduct research on the issue and rapidly ideate solutions.

I was one of five IBM employees selected to work from around the world to work on this project. I was joined by a business analyst from New York, design researcher from Denver, a developer from Ireland, and a solutions architect from Austin. Together, we did design thinking exercises, held over 20 interviews with cancer care professionals to develop a strategy to improve cervical cancer screening in Sub-Saharan Africa.

The problem we dealt with to start was...we didn't know where to start. The brief was simply to reduce the burden of cancer in Sub-Saharan Africa. A huge disease. A huge geography.

We needed to refine the scope. There were two big questions we wanted answered to help refine the scope and make this project manageable and strategic.

1. What kind of cancer should we look at?
2. What geographical area or "type" should we design for that will have the most impact?

Before the team met in Boston, we met online to start investigating the biggest challenges in cancer-care in Sub-Saharan African countries. I led interviews and secondary research with the other design researcher to understand the major cancer types in the region.

We met in Boston to do a three-week workshop with nurses, doctors, and specialists. We started to map out the patient journey. From there, we could start to locate the most effective part of their journey to provide solutions for.

In our research and design thinking exercises, we mapped out the different settings that care takes place and the needs, motivations, and challenges of healthcare professionals involved in cancer care. We focused on cervical cancer, the most dangerous cancer in Sub-Saharan Africa - and one of the most preventable cancers we know of.

Our recommendation to the Harvard Medical School was to implement a low-cost "see-and-treat" cervical cancer screening training for nurses in rural and urban settings. Training nurses the "see and treat" cervical cancer screening method was the most scalable because we learnt that nurses are the most robust and reliable health practitioner in Sub-Saharan Africa.