Strengthening Youth Mental Health Innovations

Since 2011, Grand Challenges Canada has invested in 132 mental health projects across 42 low- and middle-income countries. In November 2024, GCC convened partners and innovators in the Global Mental Health portfolio in Rabat, Morocco. 

After more than a decade of investing in mental health innovation, the first-ever Being Global Gathering brought together youth mental health advocates and innovators from across the globe for three days of intensive learning, sharing, and connection-building to strengthen youth mental health innovations.

The gathering was an important opportunity to reflect on successes and challenges related to evidence generation, sustainability, and scale for mental health innovations. Key takeaways included:

• More needs to be done to support an enabling ecosystem for mental health innovations. Funding innovations in isolation isn’t enough to enable the scale and sustainability of these interventions in the long term. It takes a coordinated effort to address existing country-level barriers that prevent innovations from being successful. 
• Measuring individual outcomes at scale is a challenge. Solutions require context-specific approaches and flexibility among donors to allow for deeper research, qualitative studies, and measuring outcomes that extend beyond donor reporting requirements.
• Leveraging technology, traditional and social media is essential in amplifying the positive impact of youth mental health programs and services;
• Schools and public education play a critical role in supporting positive youth mental health outcomes.
• Innovators have a wealth of insights about the best practice approaches to youth participation. Creating spaces for sharing and collaboration is crucial for their success.

Gatherings like these are essential for advancing youth mental health; they create rare opportunities for researchers, funders and innovators to exchange insights, align efforts, and foster the collaborations necessary to achieve sustained impact.

This is one of our Members’ success stories from 2024. Learn more about the campaign and other members’ achievements here.