EDITOR’S NOTE: This story was reported in collaboration with the Global Health Reporting Center with support from the Pulitzer Center.

Maina Modu, an immunization officer in Nigeria’s northeastern Borno state, lost his wife, Hauwa, to cervical cancer in 2011. She was one of the 349,000 women globally who die from the preventable cancer every year. Thirteen years later, he jumped at the chance to protect his family and community from undergoing such loss again.

In May 2024, Modu helped launch Borno’s first immunization campaign to vaccinate adolescent girls against human papillomavirus (HPV), the pathogen that causes nearly all cervical cancers. And he made sure two of his daughters, including the youngest child of his late wife, were among the first to be protected.

“More than any other person, I was so excited when I heard about the vaccine,” said Modu, who has 10 children.

“I was so happy that they were safe,” he said. “It reminds me of the lost glory of my wife.”

His daughters were among 86 million girls vaccinated as part of a campaign led by Gavi, a public-private partnership that works with government health systems in lower-income countries to protect children and adolescents against more than 20 infectious diseases. Seventy-three million of those girls were vaccinated in just the past three years, most of them in Africa and Asia.

Its HPV vaccination program is a key piece of the World Health Organization’s global strategy to put cervical cancer on a path to elimination, following diseases like measles, polio and smallpox. But the pace of its progress against HPV and cervical cancer is now under threat after unexpected funding cuts by the US government.

Gavi set an ambitious target to dramatically scale up its HPV vaccine program in 2023. On Monday, the organization announced that it had met its goals.

“Thanks to incredible commitment from countries, partners, civil society and communities, we have now reached that target ahead of schedule,” said Dr. Sania Nishtar, Gavi’s CEO. “This collaborative effort is driving major global progress towards eliminating one of the deadliest diseases affecting women.”

But the celebration is taking place under a heavy shadow. In June, US Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. stunned health officials when, in a video address to world leaders gathered to pledge funding to Gavi, he said the US was pulling all financial support until the organization could “re-earn the public’s trust.”

Kennedy, a longtime anti-vaccine activist who h