Walking Alongside Adolescents to Improve Their Mental Health

Due to deeply ingrained social taboos, limited resources, and conservative cultural norms, adolescents in Kenya often do not receive consistent, rights-based education in reproductive health, life skills, and psychological well being, which has cascading negative consequences on their lives and their futures.

Our Solution:

In response, ZanaAfrica has developed Nia Yetu, a 25-session facilitated health and life skills curriculum adapted from best practice resources in adolescent health education and informed by the insights of the girls and communities we serve. Nia Yetu covers a range of important yet highly stigmatized topics, all of which are directly linked to mental health and wellness, including:

  • Puberty, reproduction, and family planning

  • Gender, power, rights, and consent

  • Sexual and gender-based violence

  • Mental health and wellness

  • Managing stress, anger and conflict

  • Agency, self-confidence, and decision making

  • Healthy relationships and resisting peer pressure

Nia Yetu is a proven, effective, and interactive curriculum that can be shared by teachers, mentors, community health workers, and mental health practitioners. It provides accurate and engaging health and life skills information for youth to enhance their self-efficacy, resilience, agency, mental health, and decision-making.

Teacher Training with a trauma-informed lens:

We are currently training a cohort of public school teachers to deliver our health and life skills curriculum across Kenya through public schools and community-based groups. Our educational content is developed and delivered through a trauma-informed lens, designed to reduce and respond to trauma responses that may be experienced by educators or students when delivering or receiving our content. Through this approach, we help adolescents understand and respond to the impact of trauma on their lives and empower them to regain control of their lives.

Social and Behavior Change Communication 

Additionally, we create and deliver engaging social and behavior change communication content that addresses health, agency, and resilience through youth-centric printed magazines and comics. During the COVID lockdown, to support the mental health of homebound youth, we created a comic series specifically designed to improve adolescent mental health and wellness during the pandemic. Addressing trauma and supporting the psychological wellbeing of adolescents is a core component of our approach and is ingrained in all of our educational content. 

Collaborative Research

In partnership with Dignitas and Education Design Unlimited (EDU) and in collaboration with the Global Partnership for Education, we are conducting an applied research project aimed at adapting our and life skills program to address socio-emotional, mental, and physical challenges that hinder Gender, Equity, and Inclusion (GEI) in schools.

The purpose of this research is to generate evidence and program adaptations to scale the Nia Program in arid and semi-arid (ASAL) counties of Kenya, which comprise approximately half of the country’s geography. This project will be implemented over a two-year period (March 2024 to February 2026) in schools in Garissa and Turkana Counties, which have high numbers of internally displaced people (IDPs) and refugees in remote contexts, many of whom carry a heavy psychosocial load and may be experiencing poor mental health.

Empowering the Next Generation

Through our health and life skills education programs, we are supporting the next generation with the skills and tools they need to exercise aspects of their health and rights, empowering them to become architects of a more just and equitable future. Here’s an example of a comic, “Nia at Home,” which we developed to support adolescents’ mental health and wellness.