Co-designing mental health solutions with young people in Rwanda

Implementing a digital mental health solution in Rwanda.
What does real, meaningful co-design look like?
What does it mean to truly engage with a community to develop a solution they actually use and that addresses their problems?
What incentives and mindsets allow us to, instead of 'driving' a certain technology into a context, stop and listen, and go in with no pre-conceived notion of what would be built?
How do we get procurement and policy to really value and elevate equitable solutions?

These are some of the great questions we covered in the latest podcast episode with Dr Jana Alagarajah. His wide experience, and work implementing a digital mental health tool with young people in Rwanda gives us some great talking points. Jana shares what he learned working with people and community leaders, as well as carers, and how they approached co-design and evaluation.

We also talked about his insights from working in partnership with UNICEF, USAID, the King's Fund and Health Foundation. 

Dr Jana Alagarajah (MD MPH): Digital mental health specialist, UK-trained public health doctor, and psychiatrist co-designing equitable and impactful digital health innovation in Africa with young people as Technical Lead at YLabs. Partnering with UNICEF, USAID, and Gates Foundation, he leverages digital tools to strengthen health systems.

Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/janaganalagarajah/

YLabs: https://www.ylabsglobal.org/
Grand Challenges Canada: https://www.grandchallenges.ca/

Key Resources: 

• Design:
  • Co-design: YLabs’ Youth-driven approach to digital health focussing on co-designing with youth. 
  • Designing for diversity: Importance of co-creating culturally adapted tech to address health inequalities in diverse populations - report from NHS Race and Health Observatory. 
  • Regulation: Co-developed Africa’s first evidence-based digital mental health regulation (‘HealthTech Hub Africa Digital Health Policy Blueprint 1.0’) with the Rwandan Ministry of Heath, Africa CDC, Jhpiego, Novartis Foundation covering key design elements such as interoperability, data privacy and UX approaches to meet the needs of diverse populations. 
• Implementation:
  • Digital stigma reduction tool: ‘Prepare for a Better Tomorrow’ (Rwanda, 2021): Rwanda’s first youth-driven, holistic digital learning and peer support platform to increase mental health literacy and psychosocial support for Rwandan youth aged 10-19 years old. Funded by Grand Challenges Canada. 
  • Digital tools for mental healthcare workers: ‘USAID Kijana Nahodha’ (Tanzania, 2023): digital mental health education and referral tool for community health workers in Tanzania as part of a $5.4M USAID grant, impacting 140,000 youth and 250 community health workers. 
• Evaluation: 
  • Evidence generation: A systematic literature review evaluating the efficacy of digital mental health technologies for youth in low and middle-income countries: Alagarajah J, Ceccolini D, Butler S. Digital mental health interventions for treating mental disorders in young people based in low-and middle-income countries: A systematic review of the literature. Cambridge Prisms: Global Mental Health. 2024;11:e74. doi:10.1017/gmh.2024.71
  • Innovative approaches to digital evaluation: At YLabs, we have utilized traditional evaluation methodologies such as cluster RCTs to evaluate our digital interventions. However, given the challenges in evaluating digital health solutions, novel methodologies, such as cyclical evaluation, can be used to maximize usability, and support integration into health systems.