A path to sustainable treatments for orphaned and vulnerable children: lessons from community-based efforts in Uganda

The world's population of orphaned and vulnerable children (OVC) poses formidable obstacles to global mental health. Because countries that have large OVC populations also tend to be the countries least able to provide children with required psychosocial support, many counselling services tend to be community-based. Our experiences working with Counseling Orphans, Promoting Empowerment (COPE), a community-based OVC counselling programme in Uganda, highlight two major information gaps that such organisations face, namely, a lack of activities and curricula for peer-group counselling sessions and a lack of empirical evaluation framework for assessing their services. In order to address these two needs, we have launched an early version of a website that curates activity guides and evaluation frameworks. In this paper, we highlight the need for such a platform in facilitating a dialogue and information exchange to improve the mental health of the OVC population.