@All, I’d value your views on this, especially from colleagues in research, school health and community programmes.
A recent Kenya News Agency report argues that burning schools, drug and alcohol abuse and teenage pregnancy are symptoms of poor adolescent mental health. Its proposed remedy is earlier coaching and mentorship, and it calls for certified adolescent and youth coaches to be deployed to schools. These are the numbers behind that argument:
Adolescents and youth make up about 65% of Kenya’s population.
1. The report says there are only nine accredited adolescent and youth coaches nationwide. This comes from one coaching academy, and I haven’t found an independent count.
2. Half of all mental disorders begin by age 14, and about 75% by age 24.
3. Mental health receives less than 0.1% of the national health budget, and some sources put it at 0.01%.
That raises a few questions for the group:
1. Scale: Is coaching a model that can reach adolescents at scale, or a boutique intervention for the few?
2. The interim: While a workforce is trained, which existing structures carry this function today (schools, CHPs, peer networks)? How well are they equipped to do it?
3. Trade-offs: For adolescents already in crisis, could investing in coaching draw resources away from underfunded clinical services? Or is it a prevention layer that eases pressure on them?
4. Evidence: There is promising Kenyan work on lay and peer-delivered approaches, such as Shamiri and MindSKILLZ. Is there evidence specifically on certified coaching, or are we borrowing from adjacent models?
Here is the Kenya News Agency article:
