Chi Kong Li (Hong Kong), Edith Grynszpancholc (Argentina), Federico Antillon (Guatemala), Gevorg Tamamyan (Armenia), John Agenkorah (Ghana), Joyce Balagadde Kambugu (Uganda), Liliana Vasquez (Peru), Maria Otth (Switzerland), Ramandeep Singh Arora (India), Paula Schaiquech (Argentina), Helen Irving (Australia), Mohamed Alqudimat (Jordan/Canada)

The mission of the SIOP Essential Medicines Working Group is to improve equity of access to affordable quality essential medicines for all children and adolescents  with cancer worldwide in the context of global programmes such as the WHO Global Initiative for Childhood Cancer (GICC), the Global Platform for Access to Childhood Cancer Medicines, and the Global Accelerator for Paediatric Formulations (GAP-f), through research, advocacy, and capacity-building that leverages the expertise and initiative of the SIOP community.

The SIOP EM WG will pursue its mission by:

• Acting as a convening and dissemination forum on essential medicines for childhood cancer to generate and enhance bidirectional knowledge sharing and translation between global health governance institutions and local health system stakeholders;
• Shining political light on essential medicines for childhood cancer through advocacy, awareness-raising and multi-stakeholder engagement;
• Undertaking specific projects on jointly defined priority topics;
• Exploring the opportunity to focus on health system work and other relevant areas with impact on access at the national and institutional levels.

In this way, the WG will: generate information from all continents and engage the SIOP and CCI communities and constituencies; build solutions with stakeholders, in particular the WHO; run projects and propose actions to SIOP; and make the voice of SIOP heard in the field of essential medicines for children and adolescents with cancer.