In-Congress Workshop 3 - CANCELLED: Task-sharing Lay Health Worker Training and Supervision of Cognitive and Behavioural Therapies in Africa. Lessons from Zimbabwe

Sub-Saharan Africa faces significant gaps in mental health treatment access, mainly due to a shortage of healthcare workers and inadequate infrastructure (WHO, 2024). To bridge this gap, task-sharing models involving treatment providers who are trained community members, such as grandmothers, peers, and primary counsellors, have become essential, culturally sensitive methods to enhance access to and acceptance of mental health services (WHO, 2022). Research from Zimbabwe and other African countries demonstrates that, with appropriate training and supervision, these community members turned lay counsellors can effectively provide structured, evidence-based psychological interventions, including cognitive behavioural therapy (CBT), resulting in high acceptance and positive clinical outcomes among patients (Bere et al., 2016; Chibanda et al., 2016; Abas et al., 2023).

The effectiveness and long-term sustainability of these models rely on well-structured, continuous training and supervision systems that are participatory, tailored to the local context, and attentive to the unique roles and experiences of various cadres. However, many clinical settings and programs lack specific, practical guidance on designing and implementing these task-sharing training and supervision models to preserve intervention fidelity, promote well-being among diverse community members, and uphold ethical standards for intervention delivery.

We propose to hold a master clinician seminar to share experiential methods for training and supervising different cadres of community mental health workers in CBT-based interventions. I am well prepared to lead this master class, with 10 years of experience training and supervising lay counsellors in Zimbabwe, Malawi, and Ghana. Drawing lessons learned from collaborations among Harvard University, Boston University, and the University of Zimbabwe’s Tendai4Prep study, in which lay counsellors are trained to deliver a CBT-based intervention to support pre-exposure prophylaxis use during pregnancy and postpartum, this seminar closely aligns with WCCBT’s commitment to promoting accessible, high-quality, and culturally responsive cognitive behavioural therapies worldwide.