Wealth Divides Cervical Cancer Screening for Ethiopian Women Living with HIV

Cervical cancer is one of the most preventable malignancies in medicine, yet it continues to kill hundreds of thousands of women each year, and the overwhelming majority of those deaths occur in low- and middle-income countries. A new study from Ethiopia adds a sobering layer to this familiar picture: even among women living with HIV, a group that faces a substantially elevated risk of cervical cancer and is supposed to be prioritized for screening, uptake of the procedure remains strikingly low and is unevenly distributed along socioeconomic lines. The research, published in the International Journal for Equity in Health, draws on a nationally representative population-based survey to quantify just how far the country remains from equitable coverage, and it identifies the social characteristics that explain most of the gap.

The analysis was led by Melkam Andargie Belay of Dilla University, together with colleagues at Dilla University and the University of Gondar, and it exploited a rare and valuable data source: the Ethiopia Population-based HIV Impact Assessment, or EPHIA, a household survey conducted in 2017 and 2018. Because EPHIA combined HIV testing with detailed questionnaires on health service use and household assets, it allowed the researchers to link a woman’s HIV status and screening history to her household wealth, place of residence, education, marital status, and other sociodemographic characteristics. From the survey, the team identified 361 women living with HIV who were between 25 and 49 years old, the age band in which cervical cancer screening is recommended in Ethiopia’s national guidelines.

The headline number is bleak. Only 15.5 percent of the women living with HIV in the sample reported ever having been screened for cervical cancer, with a 95 percent confidence interval running from 11.8 to 20.1 percent. In other words, roughly five out of six women in the highest-risk group for this disease had never undergone a screening test. Women living with HIV are at elevated risk because infection with the human immunodeficiency virus impairs immune control of human papillomavirus, the sexually transmitted agent that causes virtually all cervical cancers. Persistent HPV infection in immunocompromised women progresses more rapidly to precancerous lesions and invasive cancer, which is precisely why global guidelines call for more frequent and earlier screening in this population.

What makes the study distinctive is not simply the low overall uptake but the systematic way the authors dissected the inequality embedded within it. The team used a battery of standard health-equity methods, each capturing a different facet of disparity. They constructed equiplots to display screening rates side by side across wealth quintiles. They drew concentration curves, which plot the cumulative share of screening uptake against the cumulative share of the population ranked by wealth, and they computed the concentration index, a single number that summarizes whether a health service is disproportionately used by the rich or the poor. They supplemented these with the slope index of inequality and the relative index of inequality, regression-based measures that quantify absolute and relative differences across the entire socioeconomic gradient rather than only between extreme groups. All analyses were survey-weighted to account for the complex multistage sampling design of EPHIA, ensuring that the estimates reflect the national population of women living with HIV rather than the idiosyncrasies of the sample.

The results revealed a clear wealth gradient. Screening uptake rose from 9.6 percent among women in the poorest household wealth quintile to 20.4 percent among women in the middle quintile, an absolute difference of 10.8 percentage points. The concentration index came out at 0.077, a positive value indicating that screening was concentrated among women of higher socioeconomic status. The magnitude is modest compared with the extreme inequities documented for some other health services in the region, but the authors emphasize that any pro-rich concentration in a preventive service is troubling, particularly when overall coverage is so low that even the wealthiest quintile falls far short of meaningful population protection. In a setting where screening capacity is limited, the women best positioned to reach clinics are the ones getting through the door.

To move beyond description, the researchers turned to Fairlie decomposition, a statistical technique borrowed from labor economics that partitions a gap in an outcome between groups into the portions attributable to differences in observed characteristics. Applied here to wealth-related inequality in screening, the decomposition produced two dominant findings. Residence accounted for 61.2 percent of the wealth-related inequality, and marital status accounted for 49.3 percent. These figures indicate that the screening gap between richer and poorer women is largely explained by where women live and whether they are married, rather than by wealth itself operating through, say, education or awareness in a more diffuse way. Urban women, who tend to live closer to facilities offering visual inspection with acetic acid or other screening modalities, and married women, who may have greater household support and more frequent contact with reproductive health services, are systematically more likely to be screened.

The technical machinery behind these conclusions deserves attention because it illustrates how modern health-equity research works. The concentration index, bounded between minus one and plus one, doubles the area between the concentration curve and the line of equality; a value of zero would mean screening uptake is distributed identically across the wealth distribution. The slope index of inequality expresses the absolute difference in coverage between the hypothetically richest and poorest individuals after accounting for the ranked position of every group, while the relative index of inequality expresses the same contrast as a ratio. By triangulating these measures, the authors guarded against the possibility that a single statistic might mislead, and by weighting every estimate with the survey’s sampling probabilities they ensured the figures generalize to Ethiopia as a whole. The Fairlie decomposition then converted a descriptive observation, that richer women are screened more often, into an actionable one: the gap tracks residence and marital status, which are modifiable targets for outreach.

The findings land at a consequential moment. The World Health Organization has launched a global strategy to eliminate cervical cancer as a public health problem, built on three pillars: high coverage of HPV vaccination, widespread screening with treatment of precancerous lesions, and access to cancer care. The elimination targets call for screening a large majority of eligible women at least once in the relevant age window, a threshold that Ethiopia’s 15.5 percent uptake among women living with HIV does not approach. Because women living with HIV are explicitly designated a priority group in the WHO framework, the Ethiopian data suggest that the very population the elimination strategy most depends on reaching is being left behind, and left behind unevenly. National policy in Ethiopia likewise directs health services to prioritize HIV-positive women for cervical screening, making the observed gap a matter of policy compliance as much as clinical practice.

The authors argue that closing the gap will require deliberately targeted, equity-focused interventions rather than a uniform expansion of services that would predictably reach the same advantaged groups first. Their decomposition results point to concrete levers. Programs that bring screening to rural communities, through mobile clinics, integration with existing antiretroviral therapy visits, or outreach through community health workers, would directly address the residence-driven component of inequality. Interventions attentive to unmarried women, who may face stigma, reduced household support, or fewer touchpoints with maternal and reproductive health services, would address the marital-status component. Integrating screening into routine HIV care is an especially promising avenue, since women on antiretroviral therapy already maintain regular contact with the health system, and co-locating services removes a major access barrier that falls hardest on the poorest and most remote patients.

There are limits to what a single cross-sectional survey can show. The analysis captures screening uptake at one point in time, cannot establish causal relationships between wealth, residence, marital status and screening, and rests on a sample of 361 women, which, while adequate for the survey-weighted methods employed, limits the precision of subgroup estimates. Self-reported screening may also be subject to recall error. Yet the study’s strengths are considerable: a nationally representative data source, a rigorous suite of inequality metrics, and a decomposition that converts a broad concern about inequity into specific, testable targets for intervention. As the authors conclude, achieving the WHO’s elimination goals and complying with Ethiopia’s own national policy will demand a more purposeful approach, one that places marital status and residence at the center of program design. Further research, they note, should build on these findings to ensure that the promise of cervical cancer elimination extends to every woman living with HIV, not only to those fortunate enough to live near a screening clinic or to have a spouse who encourages the visit.

Subject of Research: Socioeconomic inequalities in cervical cancer screening uptake among women living with HIV in Ethiopia

Article Title: Socioeconomic inequalities in cervical cancer screening uptake among women living with HIV in Ethiopia: findings from the Ethiopian population-based HIV impact assessment survey

Article References: Andargie Belay, M., Tenkolu Bune, G., Melkamu Asaye, M., & Alemu, K. (2026). Socioeconomic inequalities in cervical cancer screening uptake among women living with HIV in Ethiopia: findings from the Ethiopian population-based HIV impact assessment survey. International Journal for Equity in Health. https://doi.org/10.1186/s12939-026-03012-9

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1186/s12939-026-03012-9

Keywords: cervical cancer screening, women living with HIV, socioeconomic inequality, Ethiopia, EPHIA survey, health equity, concentration index, Fairlie decomposition, HPV, WHO elimination strategy, rural-urban disparities, public health