My project- A Community Engaged Approach to Investigating the Transferability of Youth Readiness Intervention (YRI) for Adolescents facing Adversity in Post conflict School-Based Settings in Northern Uganda- is situated in predominantly rural low resource public schools. Prior to my Fogarty year, I was working largely in school-based settings, first in Uganda and in more recently in what is considered as the Deep South of the United States. Through this experience, I have come to appreciate the role of schools in many resource-constrictive areas.
A school in a typical low-income Sub-Saharan African context, for example, Northern Uganda, is like a magnet with the capacity to draw in multiple community stakeholders who can contribute positively to the growth and development of children and adolescents. However, it is still an uphill task for researchers, clinicians, and policy makers to reimagine the current child and adolescent mental health infrastructure in Uganda. This is mostly due to shortage of manpower, limited funding, and the glaring disparities in mental health services access for many rural communities.
Last year, my community mobilizer set out to get me support letters from my collaborating schools and in the end, what seemed like a straightforward activity proved the opposite. The task itself highlighted many challenges that rural schools grapple with, including a lack of resources and being located in “hard-to-reach” areas, further emphasizing accessibility issues. For instance, when my community mobilizer arrived at the schools on his second day of travel, he assumed that the schools had computers. He was wrong. In fact, neither schools had computers and so he had to travel another 50 miles back to the nearest town to print the letters and then had to bring the letters back to have them signed. Thankfully, in the end we were able to get the support letters that we needed. However, the arduous task of navigating this process raised lingering questions about adaptation—its feasibility, adoptability, acceptability, and usefulness. How can we satisfactorily apply implementation and data science methods to bridge the mental health gap in such “high need” contexts? What fits and what doesn’t? Moreso, for evidence based practice.