Children’s drawings for the Amaka Amasanyufu Manual

The children’s drawings presented here were inspired by the need to make the “Amaka Amasanyufu” (“Happy Families”) manual content more engaging and accessible to participating children and their family members. The Amaka Amasanyufu (Happy Families) is a manual that was adapted to the Uganda context for the multiple-family group (MFG) intervention which aims to strengthen family life, especially in families where children struggle behaviorally.

School children were invited to draw pictures illustrating the main topics covered through the 16 sessions in the manual. This would not only strengthen community engagement and empower children, but also make the manual potentially more relatable for children participating in the study.

These drawings were obtained from primary school pupils in Grade 4 from 30 schools that partnered with ICHAD in previous studies. Each school was randomly assigned to one of the sixteen topics. The SMART Africa team wrote a short description of each topic with simple language accompanied by related questions that the teachers could use to elicit drawings from their pupils. The topics and the related questions were then delivered to the respectively assigned schools. The exercise and its purpose were explained to Grade 4 teachers in the presence of the Head teacher. Each school was given one week before the SMART Africa-Uganda team returned to collect the drawings.

At the end of this activity, the team collected 1,280 drawings. These drawings were first showcased during the 2nd Annual Conference on Child Behavioral Health in Sub-Saharan Africa and are also on display on SMART Africa website. Below is a  full presentation of drawings.