Innovation Impact Series with Dr Tedros: Scaling Mental Health Innovations in the African Region (AFRO)

On September 29th, 9-10:30 am (CEST), we invite you to join WHO Director-General, Dr Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, the Regional Director of the Regional Office for Africa (AFRO) and other distinguished leaders from the African region, WHO mental health experts, the WHO Innovation Hub, the external innovators listed below, and their funders, to learn about existing evidence-based mental health innovations in the African region and potential paths to scale for these types of efforts moving forward.

• Friendship Bench, Zimbabwe: Community-based mental health innovation for people living with HIV
• THE SEEK-GSP Programme, Uganda: Group support psychotherapy (GSP) sessions to treat depression delivered by trained community healthcare workers
• The Erq Ma’ed - or reconciliation table, Ethiopia: Mixed talk radio, communications, and community -based counselling

We know unmet mental health needs are some of the most significant contributors to reduced quality of life globally and a major consequence of health challenges of our time, including the COVID-19 pandemic.

The African region currently has an estimated 1.4 mental health workers per 100,000 people, a number significantly below the global average and a deficit of what is required to address mounting demands related to mental health. This is one of many signals of the need for new and innovative approaches to scale-up access to effective mental health support and services in the region. While we still have some way to go before meeting mental health demands in the African region, innovative approaches are increasingly showing their worth in contributing to improved access and outcomes and signalling their potential for scale-up via health system integration.

This is the second event in the WHO Innovation Impact Series with Dr Tedros, which launched in May 2021, to demonstrate a new way of working in WHO and beyond, bringing together efforts across the three levels and with key external collaborators to assess and adopt meaningful innovations for greater impact.

A future where all individuals have access to quality mental health support and services is both possible and necessary; and a driving vision for WHOs Special Initiative for Mental Health Health. Mental health is implicitly interconnected to multiple SDGs and targets, underscoring the importance of investing in improving population-level mental health as a precondition to achieve global health objectives.

Join us on September 29th to explore the impact already achieved through mental health innovations in the African region and what the future opportunities for expanding such efforts may be.