Scaling-up co-designed adolescent mental health interventions

Up to 1 in every 3 adolescent girls will experience a mental health condition during the pregnancy and the year after birth (known as the perinatal period). While the majority of adolescent pregnancies occur in sub-Saharan Africa, there is limited evidence as to what interventions can improve mental health outcomes in this setting. The Innovative approaches for adolescent periantal wellbeing (INSPIRE) project sought to address this gap in knowledge and care by developing solutions to improve adolescent perinatal mental health outcomes in rural and peri-urban settings in Kenya and Mozambique.

Through this project the Thriving Mamas programme was developed. The programme is an enhanced antenatal course designed to provide adolescents with skills and knowledge related to pregnancy and child birth, caregiving, life skills, and family planning. During the course of the INSPIRE project, our engagment with key stakeholders highlighted the difficulties policymakers, health planners, and service providers had in integrating new interventions into existing services.

Existing implementation guidelines and frameworks lack utility for those without practical integration experience. The current project (Scaling-up co-designed adolescent mental health interventions) focuses on this challenge. It aims to develop an effective and useable tookit to guide stakeholders through the process of adaptation and integration of adolescent mental health interventions.

A draft operational toolkit for adaptation and delivery will be developed through a series of workshops with policymakers, techinical experts, service providers, and young people. The agreed toolkit will then be tested through the adaptation of the Thriving Mamas programme for delivery in Mombasa (Kenya) and Maputo (Mozambique). Throughout these processes, qualitative and quantitative data will be collected to better understand participants' experiences of engaging in co-design activities, the utility and comprehensiveness of the operational toolkit, and the percieved feasibility, acceptability, and appropriateness of the Thriving Mamas programme in a new, urban setting.