Have you ever wondered what opportunities lie in the youth of our world? Well, we have, especially when it comes to young people in Kenya. This country has a whopping 10 million youths aged 15-24. But with youth comes challenges, and one of the biggest challenges they face is mental health.
Mental health issues can ruin a young person's life. It can lead to poor health, fewer job opportunities, and even risky behaviors like substance abuse. It can also lead to lifelong economic struggles and, sadly, even death. Every year, 1 million lives around the world are lost to mental health problems.
Access to mental health solutions in underserved regions like Kenya is often stopped by two main barriers: affordability and accessibility. But this isn't just a problem in Kenya. In Sub-Saharan Africa, there are 230 million youth, and in the Global South there are 500 million youth. This is why we see a huge opportunity to provide mental health solutions to young people who really need it.
We're going big. We've already helped over 124k young people and our goal is to reach 1 million youth by 2027. We work with over 300 local high schools to deliver our Shamiri Intervention. This is a program that combines social science research with a deep understanding of the local communities we work with. This lets us develop, test, and scale cost-effective interventions.
To make our work even more effective, we involve parents, teachers, and other stakeholders from the community. We also have key partnerships with the Ministry of Education, local county governments, grassroots partners, and leading international organizations.
We see a huge opportunity for impact in Kenya, across Africa, and the Global South. The need for culturally-appropriate and innovative care is a chance for us to innovate in Africa for the world. We're building a model that can be replicated around the world, and we're excited about the future.
The goal of our research is to develop interventions that can help youth actualize their life outcomes, identify which interventions work and why, and develop and test novel and accessible approaches to dissemination and scaling in order to maximize our impact.
Open science allows us to collaborate and share our work with the world. Our data and publications are open access.
Multicultural and interdisciplinary collaboration amplifies the communities that we serve.
Research is not done in a silo. It is done with and for communities. Context matters.