September should be more than a month of ribbons and awareness posts. For Kenyans living with blood cancers and disorders, it should be a reminder of the urgent need for early diagnosis, specialised care and affordable treatment.
Cancer conversations in Kenya often focus on breast, cervical, prostate and colorectal cancers. Understandably so. They account for a significant share of the country’s cancer burden.
But there is another group of diseases that deserves greater attention — blood cancers.
Leukaemia, lymphoma and multiple myeloma are not household terms for many Kenyans. Yet they can be devastating. They affect the blood, bone marrow and lymphatic system, disrupting the body’s ability to produce healthy blood cells and fight disease.
The numbers should concern us.
Kenya recorded an estimated 44,726 new cancer cases and 29,317 cancer deaths in 2022, according to the International Agency for Research on Cancer. More than 100,000 people were living with cancer diagnosed within the previous five years.
Among these cases are thousands of people affected by blood cancers, including non-Hodgkin lymphoma, leukaemia and multiple myeloma.
Yet statistics can obscure the human story.
A patient may spend months feeling unusually tired, experiencing recurrent infections, unexplained bruising, swollen lymph nodes, persistent fever or bone pain. Such symptoms can easily be attributed to stress, malaria, ageing or other common conditions. By the time the correct diagnosis is made, precious time may have been lost.
This is why awareness matters.
But awareness without access is an incomplete solution.
For years, Kenyans requiring bone marrow or stem-cell transplantation had limited options locally. Some travelled abroad, particularly to India, at enormous financial and emotional cost. Others simply could not afford it.
That picture began changing in 2022.
The Nairobi West Hospital established Kenya’s first dedicated bone marrow transplant unit and performed the country’s first successful transplant in October that year on a patient with multiple myeloma.
The significance of that development goes beyond one hospital.
It demonstrated that some highly specialised treatments previously associated with overseas medical travel could be performed in Kenya. The programme also began contributing to the development of local expertise, including training health workers in bone marrow transplant care.
More recently, the hospital’s transplant programme has continued to treat patients locally. In December 2025, a 57-year-old Kenyan with multiple myeloma underwent a successful transplant after months of debilitating symptoms and repeated blood transfusions. He was later discharged and continues with follow-up care.
Such stories should give us hope. But they should also force us to ask difficult questions.
How many patients are still diagnosed too late? How many cannot afford specialised treatment? How many families do not know that treatment options exist? And how much more could Kenya achieve if specialised cancer care was incorporated into a genuinely accessible national health system?
These are not questions for private hospitals alone.
Government, insurers, hospitals, researchers and professional bodies must work together to strengthen haematology services, pathology, cancer registries, referral systems and access to essential medicines. Health financing must also recognise that sophisticated cancer treatment is of little value if families cannot afford to reach it.
The same thinking should extend to non-cancerous blood disorders. Sickle cell disease, for example, remains a major health challenge in Africa. Advances such as red-cell exchange therapy and stem-cell transplantation are opening new possibilities for some patients, but these interventions remain inaccessible to many.
There is encouraging evidence that Kenya can build this capacity. A partnership between The Nairobi West Hospital and Jaramogi Oginga Odinga Teaching and Referral Hospital has supported the introduction of red-cell exchange therapy for sickle cell patients in Kisumu, demonstrating how specialised expertise can be shared beyond Nairobi.
That is the direction the country should pursue.
Blood Cancer Awareness Month should therefore not end with a hashtag.
It should encourage Kenyans to pay attention to persistent symptoms, seek medical advice and ask questions. It should encourage clinicians to consider blood disorders when symptoms do not fit the usual explanations. And it should challenge policymakers to make specialised treatment less dependent on a patient’s ability to pay.
The most important measure of progress is not how many awareness posters we produce.
It is how many patients get diagnosed in time, receive the right treatment and get another chance at life.
That is the kind of awareness Kenya needs.
