# Youth FORWARD: Capacity Building in Alternate Delivery Platforms and Implementation Models for Bringing Evidence-Based Behavioral Interventions to Scale for Youth Facing Adversity in West Africa

> **NIH NIH U19** · BOSTON COLLEGE · 2020 · $297,176

## Abstract

Youth FORWARD (Youth Functioning and Organizational Success for West African Regional 
Development) will establish an implementation science hub in West Africa with a dual mission: (a) to 
accelerate scaling up innovative and sustainable delivery of evidence-based mental health 
interventions for youth exposed to violence and other forms of adversity across a range of delivery 
settings; and (b) to serve as a global hub for capacity building in mental health services research on 
children, youth and families facing adversity and to conduct implementation science on the delivery of 
evidence-based mental health services via alternate delivery systems such as youth employment 
programs in West Africa. Youth FORWARD will establish partnerships that leverage the expertise and 
resources of the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health, University of Georgia College of Public 
Health, CARITAS, World Bank, the governments of Sierra Leone and Liberia, and a network of youth 
service providers and universities. A proposed Scale-Up Study will use a hybrid implementation- 
effectiveness trial design across N=24 youth employment programs to evaluate an innovative 
approach to training and supervision—Interagency Collaborative Teams (ICTs)—and their influence 
on integration, fidelity, cost and sustainment of a quality mental health intervention—the Youth 
Readiness Intervention (YRI)—into a national youth employment program—the Youth Employment 
Scheme (YES). The concurrent effectiveness trial will assess youth mental health, emotion 
regulation, functioning and economic self-sufficiency among N=960 Sierra Leonean male and female 
youth aged 15-24 over time to determine effects of the YRI when implemented under this new 
delivery platform. Guided by the EPIS implementation model, qualitative data on attitudes towards 
mental health and barriers and facilitators to the integration of mental health services into youth 
employment programs will be collected. A Capacity Building Core will build sustainable capacity to 
conduct and apply mental health services and implementation research by fostering exchange and 
mutual learning between sites, through the development and delivery of innovative and locally 
relevant training and technical assistance programs for stakeholders including West African faculty, 
students, government partners, and NGO leaders. Links between the Scale-Up Study and Capacity 
Building Core will provide opportunities for on-the-job learning in quantitative and qualitative research 
to increase capacity for implementation science. These capacity building efforts will accelerate the 
scale up of evidence-based mental health programs to address the treatment gap in West Africa and 
will help government stakeholders make greater use of the evidence-base in policy and program 
development and evaluation methods to measure program effectiveness. 
 .

## Key facts

- **NIH application ID:** 9850633
- **Project number:** 5U19MH109989-04
- **Recipient organization:** BOSTON COLLEGE
- **Principal Investigator:** Theresa Stichick Betancourt
- **Activity code:** U19 (R01, R21, SBIR, etc.)
- **Funding institute:** NIH
- **Fiscal year:** 2020
- **Award amount:** $297,176
- **Award type:** 5
- **Project period:** — → —

## Primary source

NIH RePORTER: https://reporter.nih.gov/project-details/9850633

## Citation

> US National Institutes of Health, RePORTER application 9850633, Youth FORWARD: Capacity Building in Alternate Delivery Platforms and Implementation Models for Bringing Evidence-Based Behavioral Interventions to Scale for Youth Facing Adversity in West Africa (5U19MH109989-04). Retrieved via AI Analytics 2026-05-23 from https://api.ai-analytics.org/grant/nih/9850633. Licensed CC0.

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