Innovative approaches to developing scalable and sustainable adolescent maternal mental health interventions in Kenya and Mozambique

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The majority of the 20,000 babies born to adolescent mothers in low and middle-income countries live in sub-Saharan Africa. Efforts to achieve the UN Sustainable Development Goals have focused on preventing teenage pregnancy, leaving adolescent mothers with limited support to overcome the specific challenges they face. Adolescent girls are particularly vulnerable with 1 in 2 experiencing a mental disorder during pregnancy or the year after birth. The adverse effects on their physical health, social networks, educational achievements and employment opportunities and well as the developmental, emotional, behavioural and physical health outcomes of their children are significant. Despite this inequity, no interventions focused on adolescent maternal mental health have been evaluated in these low-resource settings. This is the challenge this Fellowship will address.To support adolescent mothers and their children to survive and thrive, it is necessary to engage stakeholders in the development of mental health interventions and identify how to leverage the surrounding structures and forces to optimise interventions for both front-line use and local and national implementation through the combination of human-centred design and systems thinking approaches. Through this fellowship I will use human-centred, systems-minded design to partner with adolescent girls, their families, and health providers to design, implement, and evaluate interventions to improve the mental health of adolescents during pregnancy and the year after birth in Mozambique and Kenya.A seven-year, three-phase, mixed-method design will be used to develop and evaluate a mental health prevention intervention for pregnant and new mothers aged 15-19 living in Mozambique and Kenya. In Phase 1 (months 2-18) a human-centred, system-minded design approach will be used to partner with adolescents, their families, local service providers and policymakers to identify, adapt and prototype an intervention to improve adolescent maternal mental health outcomes in each country. In Phase 2 (months 14-48), the intervention will be piloted within each country to assess feasibility, appropriateness, and acceptability and collect mental health, process and resource data to prepare for a trial. Lastly, in Phase 3 (months 49-84), a randomised controlled trial evaluating clinical effectiveness and delivery outcomes compared to usual care/basic mental health literacy intervention will be conducted. The research will result in the development of an intervention(s) that supports adolescent maternal wellbeing and gives adolescent mothers the hope and skills to build a better life for them and their children by packaging what we know are the risk and protective factors for maternal mental disorders in a way that is attractive to young mothers, their families and service providers. By using human-centred, systems-minded design to understand the needs and priorities of young mothers and the health and community systems in which they live, the resulting intervention(s) and approach to contextual adaptation has significant potential for international transferability and impact beyond Mozambique and Kenya, and beyond Africa. In addition, the work undertaken will provide a foundation for the development of approaches to adaptation and implementation of mental health interventions which can be used by providers of mental health interventions across the lifespan.