NIHR Global Health Research Group on Promoting Child and Adolescent Mental Wellbeing in sub-Saharan Africa There is an urgent need to improve children's and adolescents' well-being in sub-Saharan Africa. The World Health Organisation recommends preventative mental health interventions in schools. Mindfulness has proven to be an acceptable and effective use of resources in countries like the UK. When children and adolescents focus on being mindful, they slow down, take their time, and focus on something in a way that is both relaxing and stress-free. Practising mindfulness makes children and adolescents happier. It improves their attention span, helps them manage stress, increases their sense of well-being, and improves their communication skills. It also improves their school performance. Teaching mindfulness also improves the mental well-being of teachers. Our project will explore if mindfulness improves the well-being of children and adolescents in Sub-Saharan Africa, and if it would be a good use of government resources. 

We will deliver the project in Ethiopia and Rwanda between 2022 and 2026. We will work with parents and policymakers to agree on delivering and testing a whole school mindfulness intervention. Teacher-educators working with primary school teachers will develop an appropriate mindfulness intervention. Teachers involved in developing the intervention will train other teachers in their schools. Teachers will deliver the intervention as part of the primary school curriculum so that it reaches all children.

We will test the intervention to provide policymakers with high-quality evidence on how well it works. We will also look at the costs and benefits of delivering it in all schools. The testing will include talking to children and adolescents, their teachers, and parents about their experiences of the intervention. We will also test children's and adolescents' mental well-being before we deliver the intervention and after, to see what improvement it makes. We will also compare children who received the mindfulness training with similar children who did not. This will control for the effects of other changes in children’s lives which may be going on at the same time. We will provide feedback on all our findings to policymakers in Rwanda and Ethiopia. This will include the findings from an 'economic model' showing the potential cost savings and benefits of introducing mindfulness practices in all schools. The main objective of our project is to develop, implement and evaluate an affordable, effective, and trusted mindfulness intervention delivered in schools to improve the mental well-being of children and adolescents (CAs) in Rwanda and Ethiopia. 

The sub-objectives of this are:
1.	Identify policies for promoting the well-being of children and adolescents in Ethiopia and Rwanda and examining how they are being implemented and their effectiveness.
2.	Identify and build networks of policy actors, teacher educators, teachers, parents, and community members that have a stake in improving the well-being of children and adolescents.
3.	Train teacher educators and teachers in mindfulness and in teaching it to children.
4.	Develop a mindfulness intervention led by Rwandan and Ethiopian educators for delivery in schools. The intervention to be designed designed to promote the wellbeing of children and adolescents, and to be acceptable to policy actors, teachers and communities, including children and adolescents.
5.	Evaluate the intervention's effectiveness, including its acceptability to communities, children and their families, and teachers.
6.	Generate evidence on the intervention's affordability and effectiveness and how it can be scaled up.
7.	 Sustainably build capacity and capabilities for interdisciplinary applied health research for delivering interventions to improve the well-being of CAs.
8.	Provide an enhanced understanding of the distinct mental health challenges that face adolescent girls and boys and how these challenges are affected by gender-based discrimination.