NIHR Global Health Research Group on Promoting Children’s and Adolescent’s Mental Wellbeing in sub-Saharan Africa. There is an urgent need to improve children's and adolescents' wellbeing in sub-Saharan Africa. The mental wellbeing of children and adolescents is poor, and their educational attainment is low. Little is being done to improve their mental wellbeing, and there are few services for those in need. The WHO recommends preventative mental health interventions in schools. Mindfulness has proven to be an acceptable and effective use of resources in countries like the UK. Mindfulness involves a combination of breathing exercises, visualisation, body awareness, and relaxation. Practising mindfulness makes children and adolescents happier. It improves their attention span, helps them manage stress, increases their sense of wellbeing, improves their communication skills and their school performance. Teaching mindfulness also improves the mental wellbeing of teachers. There is a need to know if mindfulness improves the wellbeing 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. Rwanda and Ethiopia are two of the poorest countries in the world. The wellbeing of children is poor in both countries, and school attainment is low. Researchers from Ethiopia, Rwanda, and the UK will collaborate on the project. Our research team includes health experts, social scientists, and teacher educators. We have an international advisory board, including government officials from both countries. Community members, including parents, teachers, children, and adolescents, will help us design the mindfulness intervention.
We will research ways of providing an affordable and acceptable mindfulness intervention that improves children's and adolescents' wellbeing. We will work with parents and policymakers to agree on delivering and testing it. Teacher-educators working with primary school teachers will develop an appropriate mindfulness intervention and these 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, and 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 wellbeing before we deliver the intervention and after, to see what improvement it makes. We will compare children who received the mindfulness training with similar children who did not to control for the effects of other simultaneous changes in children’s lives. 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. We will tell international organisations such as the WHO and the United Nations Children's Fund about our findings. We will disseminate the findings through our website and social media in French and English. We will invite relevant organisations from across Sub-Saharan Africa to regular webinars disseminating information about the project. A training programme will educate the next generation of researchers in transdisciplinary health research. Early career researchers will be involved in every stage of the research, from design to publication of the findings. 
Improving children's and adolescents' wellbeing will enable them to enjoy their childhood and develop to their full potential. It will also improve their lives as adults, making them happier, less likely to develop mental and physical illnesses and better able to play a full role in society. Also, it reduces healthcare expenditure. 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&#39;s effectiveness, including its acceptability to communities, children and their families, and teachers.
6. Generate evidence on the intervention&#39;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 CYP.
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.