Educational Program

Estelle Sidze of African Population and Health Research Centre in Kenya will work with adolescent mothers in Nairobi slums to develop a toolkit of information, skills, and coping mechanisms, to protect their mental health during pregnancy and early motherhood. Many girls in Nairobi slums become pregnant, but have limited knowledge about how to care for a baby, and are often excluded from their homes. They will interview adolescent mothers to find out what harms their mental health during pregnancy, what effect this has on their behavior, and how they try to cope.

Jerome Ateudjieu of Meillerur Acces aux Soins de Sante in Cameroon will test whether training community volunteers to record demographic movements and monitor births and immunizations of residents and visitors in their villages can improve timely childhood vaccination coverage in Cameroon. Many health districts in Cameroon have reported outbreaks of vaccine-preventable diseases.

Folusho Balogun of the University of Ibadan in Nigeria will train older women who are traditionally involved in childcare in Nigeria to ensure infants in their communities are fully immunized. Many young children in Nigeria, particularly those in urban slums, are not fully immunized, or are immunized too late, leading to an unacceptably high under-five mortality rate. This is due in part to the mothers not understanding how critical immunizations are. In many African nations, the care of young children is also overseen by older women in the community such as grandmothers or neighbors.

Dyuti Sen and Tushar Garg from Innovators in Health in India will test whether a communal game of snakes and ladders in maternity health clinics and in homes of pregnant couples can demonstrate the value of childhood immunization to improve coverage in rural communities in Bihar, India. Gameplay may be a valuable way of informing parents about the importance of immunizing their children because it is fun and interactive.

Guitele Rahill and Manisha Joshi of the University of South Florida in the U.S. will harness the Haitian tradition of storytelling to produce online videos, brochures, and posters that support pregnant teenagers in Haiti who are at high risk of depression. There has been an increase in unplanned teenage pregnancies since the 2010 earthquake, due in part to the loss of parents, and a rise in transactional sex and sexual assaults facilitated by very limited resources.

Syed Usman Hamdani from the Human Development Research Foundation in Pakistan will develop a program that teaches life skills such as self-awareness, communication, and parenting skills, to adolescent newlyweds in poor areas of Pakistan to help them cope with the challenges of marriage, pregnancy, and bringing up children. Pakistan has one of the highest adolescent birth rates in the world, with 10% of girls giving birth before the age of 18.

Pushpendra Singh of IIIT Delhi in India will develop interactive training and mentoring sessions for community health workers in India (ASHAs) using mobile phones and interactive voice response systems so they can provide better public healthcare in rural communities. Current training programs are run by medical professionals and require the workers to visit a health center, which may be inconvenient. The lack of medical experts has also reduced the frequency of these programs.

Joanna Busza of the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine in the United Kingdom will help vulnerable young mothers who sell sex in Zimbabwe by involving them in designing self-help groups incorporating virtual meetings via social media to build support networks and teach them life skills such as money management and parenting. Adolescent sex workers who become mothers are at high risk of developing mental health problems such as anxiety and depression, and often have little support caring for their children.

Lisa Butler of the University of Connecticut in the U.S. will develop an approach to improve the mental health of pregnant and new mothers between 15 and 19 years old in Botswana that incorporates interactive group sessions mediated by trained community workers, informative text messages, and an SMS-based mental health screening tool. Between 19-25% of women in low- to middle-income countries suffer from depression during pregnancy, which can also have serious effects on the child.

Sarah Murray and colleagues of Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health and School of Nursing in the U.S. along with colleagues at the University of Bamako in Mali will develop a group approach to provide better antenatal care to pregnant adolescents in Mali and protect them from common mental disorders such as depression. Over half of adolescent girls in Mali have a child before their 18th birthday, and as a consequence are more likely to live in poverty, be uneducated, and experience violence. Although antenatal health services and support are available, they are limited.