Inside SMART Africa

SMART Africa-Ghana is a pilot study that tests the effectiveness of the Multiple Family Group (MFG) Intervention amongst approximately 180 children and their caregivers in northern Ghana. Currently, the team is completing the six-month follow up for the control school, which received mental health literature. The school where the MFG sessions were facilitated by School […]

SMART Africa-Kenya is a pilot study that tests the effectiveness of the Multiple Family Group (MFG) intervention amongst approximately 180 children and their caregivers in Kiambu County, Kenya. The Kenya team has finalized the MFG intervention in both treatment schools, both with great attendance. Families from these schools appreciated the intervention and stated that this […]

SMART Africa-Uganda is a scale-up study in Uganda that utilizes an adapted version of the evidence-based Multiple Family Group (MFG) intervention. This intervention has 16 sessions that aim to address behavioral health challenges in children and adolescents. Following a field visit by ICHAD affiliate Dr. Yesim Tozan and Dr. Fred Ssewamala in January, the SMART […]

ICHAD and SMART Africa centers were well represented by several team members at the 2020 Annual Society for Social Work and Research (SSWR) conference in Washington, DC. This year’s conference was themed ‘’Reducing Racial and Economic Inequality.” During the conference, two doctoral students Darejan Dvalishvili and William Byansi made two oral and one-poster presentations highlighting […]

William Byansi is an ICHAD Research Associate and a member of the first cohort of Researcher Resilience Training (RRT) Fellows, a training program funded by the National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH) and designed for researchers of African descent interested in adolescent behavioral health in low resource settings. The RRT is a joint program between […]

ICHAD study coordinator, Wilberforce Tumwesige, presented at the ICHAD and SMART Africa January team meeting. He presented findings from a paper that was recently submitted to the children and Youth Services Review journal, on “Understanding child employment among adolescent girls in Southwestern Uganda: Baseline findings.” Wilberforce co-authored this paper with William Byansi, Joelynn Muwanga, and […]

On December 3rd, ICHAD and SMART Africa were proud to welcome Dr. Patricia Cavazos-Rehg to our speaker series. Dr. Cavazos-Rehg is an Associate Professor of Psychiatry at Washington University in St. Louis and a Co-Leader with Dr. Fred Ssewamala on the T37 NIMHD-funded LEAD training grant (Training LEADers to Accelerate Global Mental Health Disparities Research). […]

In December, Dr. Fred Ssewamala gave a presentation at the Center for AIDS Prevention Studies (CAPS) Town Hall at the University of California San Francisco Department of Medicine on “The Potential of Economic Strengthening Interventions in the Care and Support of Children and Adolescents Impacted by HIV/AIDS: Lessons from 15 Years of Research in Sub-Saharan […]

Congratulations to SMART Africa Global Fellow and ICHAD Co-Director, Dr. Ozge Sensoy Bahar and ICHAD affiliate Penina Acayo Laker, who were awarded a pilot grant titled: “Say no to Stigma: Making mental health visible among school-going children in rural Uganda” from the Washington University’s Africa Initiative Pilot Grant Program. The research team, which includes ICHAD Co-Director and […]

The Kayayei Project seeks to provide insights into female adolescents’ unaccompanied migration for labor in Ghana. More specifically, it examines caregivers’ perspectives on: ethnotheories on childhood/adolescence; the child’s role in the family; child independent migration and labor; gender; and family processes and multi-level factors that influence female children’s decisions to migrate for work. The team […]

The ANZANSI Family Program seeks to pilot test the feasibility of an innovative combination intervention (Family economic empowerment and MFG) amongst adolescent girls at risk of dropping out of school in Northern Ghana. By promoting financial stability and strengthening family relations, this study seeks to reduce the increasing numbers of unaccompanied minors migrating from rural […]

SMART Africa-Ghana is a pilot study that tests the effectiveness of the Multiple Family Group (MFG) Intervention amongst approximately 180 children and their caregivers in northern Ghana. After returning from the holiday break, the Ghana team resumed their fieldwork activities, which include delivering MFG sessions and conducting assessments. The team completed the MFG process in […]