The model is spreading. After a learning exchange this year, PIH Sierra Leone is adapting it for Kono District and Freetown.

Nurse Willis Archie Yansine built the program by visiting communities and earning their trust. Today, young people bring their friends to the group themselves.

He went back to school in 2025 and became a peer educator. Now he helps lead sessions, talks about substance use in schools and connects others to care.

Liberia has about 10 psychiatrists, and Dr. Helen Tedros Haile is one of them. She treated Peter and connected him to a weekly peer group. Within a month, his symptoms had improved dramatically.

Two years ago, Peter J. Wallace came to a hospital in rural Liberia looking for help with alcohol use. Today, at 23, he helps lead the peer support group that supported his recovery 🧵

Mark shared these reflections at a panel on Canadian philanthropy with CAF Canada and the Pathy Family Foundation, alongside buildOn and Ancestors of Tomorrow. For those of you in the trenches of this work, how do you navigate this tension?

So where do organizations like ours fit? “Our job is to accompany those governments. So that over time, they can take this work on themselves.” At PIH, accompaniment means working alongside governments to strengthen public health systems.

“It’s governments. It’s their obligation.” Just as we expect governments to provide the essentials here in Canada, governments where we work have that obligation as well. The right to health shouldn't depend on charitable goodwill.

Health is a human right. But who is responsible for making that right a reality? “The people responsible for delivering on that right are not NGOs.” PIH Canada's National Director, @mbrender.bsky.social, gets to the heart of a question we need to grapple with. 🧵

This is what it looks like to get Results! Last weekend, we drove down to Toronto to connect with our volunteer advocates.

In this time of manufactured scarcity for those who have the least, we need to keep proving it is possible to deliver on that ambition by working for a better distribution of global resources. And we will never build a world free of cancer, or free of any other disease, until we address this.

So many of the challenges the world faces are rooted in inequality: of resources, income, and access to health care. The ambition we have for cancer care in wealthy countries should be the ambition we have for patients everywhere.

In many countries, even basic cancer care remains out of reach. For them, the systems to deliver this type of care don’t yet exist.

That’s domestic government spending only. In other words, what each country funds from its own resources— not counting foreign aid— for a full year. On EVERYTHING related to health.

Last week, Princess Margaret Hospital in Toronto received an anonymous donation of $100M as part of a $2.5B campaign for cancer care. It’s incredible generosity, and PMH does wonderful, lifesaving work.