Breast cancer awareness portal for Belarus

Inspiration

In the Republic of Belarus, while being completely free for citizens, the public health system is underfunded and is struggling to provide even most essential supplies to clinics and maintain public health awareness and screening programs. This includes breast cancer awareness programs - there are simply no such programs exists at the moment.

If you start searching for available materials or websites, you will only find isolated articles, a few blog posts, and outdated statistics, but nothing like analogous portals in other more developed countries.

In most cases, when a woman visits a mammalogist for the first time, it's because of clearly noticeable symptoms worrying her or her family, and it's too late for the non-invasive treatment.

And the situation is quite serious - more than three thousand women are being diagnosed with breast cancer every year in Belarus. About ten women learn that they have breast cancer every day. Breast cancer is the most widespread type of cancer among women in Belarus and the primary cause of death among other types of cancer.

What it does

We've built https://pobedim.by ("pobedim" translates from Russian as "we will win") - a web portal dedicated to raising awareness about breast cancer in Belarus. In essense, this is the very first and only national web portal dedicated to this cause.

We have collected, translated, and published dozens of materials about breast cancer itself, its prevention, early and professional diagnosis, treatment, and recovery.

The website allows to perform an assessment of risks related to lifestyle and other pre-existing conditions.

How we built it

The portal is built using static sites architecture (SSG or Jamstack) and requires zero maintenance. It's super lightweight, fast, and SEO optimized to be the first in Google and local search engines for any breast cancer-related searches.

It's entirely managed by the Git version control system; its content and functionality are all in one repository easily accessible for any volunteers - technical and non-technical to join the project in the future. After joining the project, volunteers are able to edit the website's contents on Github directly and submit changes for the moderators to review.

Basically, anyone with GitHub account and basic knowledge of version control technology can start contributing to the website right now. For people without such knowledge, we will provide detailed tutorials.

The goal is to make it fully self-sustained and powered by the community of volunteers.

Challenges we ran into

The main challenge is content - there is really a lack of high-quality content about breast cancer in Belarus. We had to translate publicly available sources, consult with mammalogist and use whatever pieces we could find and organize them into a single structure.
Also it was hard to find local available medical professionals for consultation and participation in the project during such a short period of time

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We've managed to create a truly zero-maintenance and self-sustained website.
The design (desktop and mobile versions) is quite complicated and it will tricky to implement everything we wanted and designed.

What we learned

To all the team members, the primary learning was to discover the severity of the breast cancer problem and its true scale in the post-USSR countries, and how little our governments and NGOs are doing to make the situation better.

What's next for Breast cancer awareness portal for Belarus

We've already started talks about collaboration with general and more specialized apps and websites in Belarus - hope it will drive more traffic and contributors
We will publish more high-quality content, and cross-check everything with professionals so that only truly valuable materials appear on the website
In the end, we hope to build a community of contributors and volunteers and make the website a central hub of everything breast cancer related in Belarus