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Promoting African adolescents’ full potential through ‘accelerator interventions’
By 2050 Africa will be home to half a billion adolescents. Despite the incredible opportunity this young population presents, they also face multiple risks and challenges. Many will find themselves trapped in a cycle of poverty, unemployment, violence, low education and poor health. In order for our continent to achieve the SDGs and the African Union’s Agenda 2063, we need new approaches that support youth development and help young people realise their aspirations.
The UKRI GCRF Accelerating Achievement for Africa’s Adolescents Hub was launched in 2019 to contribute to the goal of transforming the potential of Africa’s adolescents into a thriving future for the continent. This five-year project is one of 12 being financially supported by UK Research and Innovation Council (UKRI) Global Research Hubs through the Global Challenges Research Fund (GCRF). The project’s aim is to determine which combination of ‘accelerator’ services or interventions – from across the health, education, social and economic sectors – can most efficiently help adolescents achieve their potential across multiple life domains and SDG targets. This would provide policy makers with valuable evidence to choose programmes that work and are cost-effective and scaleable.
The project is led by an interdisciplinary team at Oxford University and the University of Cape Town, with research and government partners across Africa, as well as global partners – including UNDP, UNICEF and the WHO – NGOs and young people themselves. The University of the Western Cape (UWC), through the SOPH, is one of the Hub’s African research partners.
Since January 2020, Prof Marisa Casale has been leading a work package within the Hub that focuses on scale-up, acceptability and cost-effectiveness of adolescent interventions in Africa. In June 2020, Dr Oluwaseyi (Seyi) Somefun joined the SOPH and Hub team as a post-doctoral researcher, and has been collaborating on the adolescent acceptability component of this work.
Progress and achievements to date
In its first two years, the Hub has already exceeded its key 2024 objectives. In response to the urgent challenge of COVID-19, it is already reaching at least 38 million children and adolescents across the region (and a total of 164 million worldwide) with parenting support and cash transfers, these being the primary accelerators identified in research studies from seven African countries. The Hub has also built capacity among 30 African early-career researchers, and has produced over 40 publications, including in The Lancet and Nature journals. The work package led by Marisa, with its associated studies, has made significant headway towards its 2020/21 and longer-term goals, while adapting to the realities of COVID-19. Besides contributing to the broader Hub research and activities, she and Seyi have been directly involved in a number of specific activities and outputs.
They contributed to a major UNICEF – Accelerate Hub COVID-19 report: ‘Beyond Masks: Societal impacts of COVID-19 and accelerated solutions for children and adolescents’. This was released on World Children’s Day in November 2020, at a UNICEF webinar attended by 600 participants. They have also published six commentary pieces on COVID-19 and youth in Africa, in outlets such as The Conversation Africa and Africa in Fact, to reach broader audiences beyond academia.
Marisa has collaborated on various analyses focused on mitigating the impact of COVID-19, preventing childhood violence, and addressing mental health and treatment adherence among adolescents living with HIV. She has also co-authored six related 2020 Hub journal publications.
Findings to date
A key overarching finding is that better caregiveradolescent interaction and social support (including support groups) are important protective factors for adolescent mental health and HIV treatment adherence. Marisa is currently working with a team in the Hub and the UNICEF Southern and Eastern Africa Office to develop evidence and programming briefs, based on these findings. • A Hub-wide broad strategy for acceptability research was developed in early 2020. It includes synthesising existing empirical evidence on adolescent acceptability in Africa, refining a theoretical framework for adolescent acceptability, and collaborating with Hub projects on acceptability research. A systematic review of acceptability studies with adolescents and youth in Africa over the past decade has been completed, and is currently being written up. • Since August 2020 Marisa and Seyi have been collaborating on user testing of a mobile phone violence-prevention parenting app in 12 countries, including South Africa, Nigeria and Kenya. This Hub project is part of the open-access and rigorously evaluated Parenting for Lifelong
Health (PLH) Digital research. After usability and acceptability testing, the app will be piloted in
South Africa in collaboration with UNICEF and the Department of Social Development. • Strong progress has been made in developing and testing an approach to conducting economic analyses with observational data, and exploring approaches for ‘accelerator’ cost-benefit analyses with multiple outcomes. We look forward to future application, documentation and refinement of these approaches.
The outputs from this work published in 2019 and 2020 are included in the publications list on page 74.
Dr Oluwaseyi Somefun
Dr Oluwaseyi (Seyi) Somefun joined SOPH as a post-doctoral fellow in July 2019, linked to the UKRI GCRF Accelerating Achievement for Africa’s Adolescents Hub. As such she is involved in research investigating the cost-effectiveness and acceptability of interventions designed to improve the wellbeing of adolescents in Africa. Seyi’s scholarly interests range widely from adolescent sexual and reproductive health, social networks to mixed research methodology. She is strongly interested in improving health behaviours of adolescents through health communication and policy dissemination. She has experience in both domestic and international settings. She plays an ongoing active role in several interdisciplinary research projects. The majority of these have been published in high ranking international and national accredited journals. Seyi’s doctoral thesis applied a mixed method approach and engaged diverse young adults across different regions in Nigeria. Her central aim was to explore how young people overcome risks in the face of adversity and focus on issues like resilience and vulnerability.
