Engaging Young People in the Development of Digital Mental Health Innovation in Africa

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Mental health challenges are faced by 1 in 4 people globally, but in Low and Middle Income Countries (LMIC), up to 80% of people do not receive preventive or acute care . Digital mental health is seen as a promising route to address the treatment gap, but also raises ethical, legal and policy challenges. In LMICs, lack of ethics, governance and policy guidance can slow down or prevent translation of digital mental health innovations into the healthcare system. This impinges on the rights of individuals to access mental health technologies that arise from digital innovations. A further consequence of the lack of attention to ethics and governance challenges is that the balance of harms and benefits of digital mental health have not been properly identified and analysed. The lack of analysis is likely to disproportionately affect young people, who are a key target for mental health interventions, and who also have distinctive individual and social vulnerabilities. To address this problem, the network will bring together stakeholders and experts in the ethics of digital mental health, digital innovators, mental health practitioners, and policy makers across Africa. The chief aim is to develop a robust framework for responsible and relevant digital mental health interventions for young people in African countries. The cross-disciplinary network will have a group of young people at its core, who will co-create all its work and outputs. The network will use a stakeholder mapping surveys, workshops and interdisciplinary training and exchanges to achieve its aims. It will contribute not only to scholarship, but also to research capacity, co-production, inter-sector mobility, and democratic participation among young people. Project activities will include:-Intensive training and capacity-building opportunities for early career researchers and young people (e.g. workshops; visiting scholar programmes);-Meetings and workshops to facilitate the transfer of knowledge among stakeholders;-Literature reviews to critically assess and synthesise existing work, identify gaps, and formulate research questions-Community engagement to inform empirical questions-With young people, co-create a sustainable engagement strategy to involve young people, with a focus on representation from vulnerable groups, such as LGBTQ+; sexual violence survivors; those living with HIV/AIDSYoung people will be at the core of the Network, integrated with expert groups of researchers in ethics and social sciences; service providers (app developers, mental health practitioners and researchers); religious congregations, policy and governance. This will ensure the network outputs reflect the needs of young people and that the framework is scalable and sustainable as it is co-produced with young people, researchers, service providers, and policy makers. 1. Patel, V., Saxena, S., Lund, C., Thornicroft, G., Baingana, F., Bolton, P., et al. (2018). The Lancet Commission on global mental health and sustainable development. The Lancet, 392(10157), 1553-1598.