Organization that provides group-based IPT (IPT-G) to women led by community workers it recruits and trains intensively.<sup>2</sup> StrongMinds Uganda (SMU) began working with BRAC Uganda to develop a model to treat adolescent females with depression through BRAC’s “Empowerment and Livelihood for Adolescents” (ELA) program. ELA operates community clubs that girls can attend five times a week, which provide a safe space and an opportunity to socialize, while also offering vocational and life skills training (Bandiera et al., 2020). The clubs are led by female mentors who are selected from the community, given a low-intensity training, and paid a small stipend. While evaluations of ELA clubs have shown mixed effects globally (Bergstrom and Ozler,<sup> ̈</sup> 2023), in Uganda they were shown to be effective in reducing teen and out-of-wedlock pregnancies, child marriages, and non-consensual sexual activity (Bandiera et al., 2020). The complementarities between BRAC’s ELA programming and SMU’s goal of testing its model with adolescent populations, along with the availability of the ELA club mentors as lay-therapists, makes ELA clubs a promising avenue for the delivery of therapy to adolescents at scale and low cost. Our study aims to test whether a version of SMU’s IPT-G, in which ELA club mentors are given additional training and are supported by SMU staff to lead a 14-week group-based talk therapy intervention, can be effective in causing sustained reductions in depression among adolescent females and, if so, whether this can have any knock-on effects on increased human capital accumulation.

To identify the impact of SMU’s therapy delivery model, we implemented a clusterrandomized trial, in which 106 ELA clubs (the clusters) were randomized with equal probability into a control group and two treatment arms: (i) the SMU therapy intervention; and (ii) the SMU intervention followed by a one-time lump-sum unconditional cash transfer announced and delivered after the end of therapy. The study participants were recruited from within each ELA club’s catchment area, with all adolescent females aged 13-19 listed and screened for depression. Those exhibiting symptoms of depression were invited to participate in the study. We conducted detailed surveys with the study participants at baseline and three follow-up rounds.

Our study was designed to address three questions. The primary motivation was to assess whether IPT-G can be effective at scale in reducing depression and anxiety among adolescent females in Uganda, when delivered by nonspecialist age-peer providers.<sup>3</sup> Second, while cash transfers alone may have transitory effects on psychological well-being (see, e.g., Baird et al. 2013; Haushofer et al. 2023b; McKelway et al. 2023), there is reason to believe that they may also enhance the effects of a proven therapy intervention if offered immediately following ther-

> 2See `https://strongminds.org/about/` for details.

> 3The extant evidence suggests that CBT-based therapy interventions can be effective in improving psychological well-being, but the evidence supporting the use of these therapies for adolescents is much thinner (Singla et al., 2017; Ridley et al., 2020).

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