Researchers have been awarded £5.3 million to optimise the digital version of the Friendship Bench mental health intervention for scale in Zimbabwe and beyond.
The Friendship Bench is a community-based psychological intervention designed to address common mental health disorders, such as anxiety and depression, in communities who have low access to care.
Developed in Zimbabwe by world-renowned psychiatrist Professor Dixon Chibanda, it uses community health workers without any specialist clinical training to deliver 45-minute counselling sessions on wooden benches in communities across Zimbabwe and beyond.
The intervention has already reached over one million people across Zimbabwe, Botswana, Colombia, El Salvador, Germany, Jordan, Kenya, Malawi, UK, US, Vietnam, Zambia and Zanzibar. With this new Wellcome funding, the researchers can extend the reach of the Friendship Bench even further by optimising the existing digital Friendship Bench (Inuka) for global expansion.
The research programme will be led by Professor Chibanda at the University of Zimbabwe and London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, with co-investigators Professor Melanie Abas, Professor Kimberley Goldsmith , Ms Poushali Ganguli (Institute of Psychiatry, Psychology & Neuroscience) and Dr Gabrielle Samuel (Faculty of Social Science & Public Policy) at King's College London.
The Friendship Bench has enabled evidence-based treatment to be accessed in communities with limited access to mental health support. With this Wellcome Mental Health Award, King's College London will continue our long-standing reciprocal research collaboration with the University of Zimbabwe and the Friendship Bench Non-Governmental Organisation to optimise the digital version of the Friendship Bench. This will involve working with people with lived experience to make mental health solutions globally accessible and reducing inequity in access to care, while mutually building our capacity in digital health research.
Professor Melanie Abas, Director of the King's Global Health Institute
A digital version of The Friendship Bench will make this important mental health intervention more available and accessible. I look forward to continuing to collaborate with the teams at King's College London and the University of Zimbabwe in robustly evaluating the new version of the intervention, including by applying cutting-edge methods to discover the mechanisms which make it effective.
Professor Kimberley Goldsmith, Professor of Medical Statistics and Complex Intervention Methodology at King's College London
Working across an interdisciplinary team, the researchers will continue to foster international collaboration between King's College London and the University of Zimbabwe to build on the success of the Friendship Bench.
The research programme is part of the Wellcome Mental Health Award 'Accelerating scalable digital mental health interventions'. It began in November 2025 and will take place over the next five years.
