YiPEE: Youth co-Production for sustainable Engagement and Empowerment in health India Kenya South Africa Sweden

Background

Most traditional youth mental health interventions fail to achieve sustainable impact at scale because they overly rely on individualized, medical illness-focused models and treat youth as passive beneficiaries. citiesRISE, a multi-stakeholder initiative founded in 2017 to address these gaps, has worked with youth, communities, and professionals across five cities, as well as social innovators in over twenty countries, to develop a set of evidence-based, scalable youth mental health interventions and implementation models.

Aims

The YiPEE project aims to provide robust evidence on the feasibility, adaptability, effectiveness, and cost-effectiveness of a multi-component intervention targeting the inner, social, and environmental dimensions that underpin mental health and broader NCD risk reduction outcomes, when implemented using a youth-informed and -activated approach.

Project plan

This will be achieved through a a mixed-methods approach, conducting a realist evaluation across the four sites (Chennai, India; Nairobi, Kenya; Cape Town, South Africa; Stockholm, Sweden) to study key implementation outcomes following the Practical Robust Implementation and Sustainability Model (PRISM) as well as the mechanisms underlying why the intervention works, for whom, and under what real-world conditions. In Chennai, YiPEE will conduct a randomized controlled trial for more robust evaluation of effectiveness and cost-effectiveness in achieving key mental health and other NCD related lifestyle behavioral outcomes. YiPEE focuses on the combination of a school-based multicomponent intervention targeting positive disruption in the inner, social, and environmental dimensions of adolescents’ mental health and a youth-informed and -activated implementation model that puts young people at the centre of transformation, working collaboratively with a range of other stakeholders.

Publications and output

You may visit the project website for more information.

Principal investigators

Funding organisations

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