Care that scales
A three-tier system where trained young adults deliver brief, evidence-based mental health care — supervised by professionals, backed by clinicians. Validated in randomized trials and delivered at a fraction of the cost.
Young people helping young people — with experts behind them
Most mental health systems fail because they depend on scarce professionals. Ours expands who can deliver care through WHO-endorsed task-shifting. We train young adult lay providers to deliver effective group-based care and support them within a clinical structure that maintains quality at every level.
Tier 1: Shamiri Fellows
Young adults, aged 18–24, are trained and supervised to deliver brief, four-session group interventions in community settings such as schools. After 20 hours of training and ongoing supervision, they lead sessions that teach evidence-based skills like growth mindset, gratitude, value affirmation, sense of purpose, and problem solving. These are "strengths-based" or "wise" interventions—simple techniques that target the psychological processes that sustain distress.
Tier 2: Shamiri Supervisors
Professionals with backgrounds in mental health or clinical social work. They recruit and train Fellows, provide weekly supervision, and deliver one-on-one support for young people with elevated symptoms.
Tier 3: Shamiri Experts
Psychologists and psychiatrists manage complex and high-risk cases through established referral pathways. Every young person gets the right level of care.
Shamiri Experts
Manage complex cases
Shamiri Supervisors
Recruit, train, supervise & provide one-on-one care
Shamiri Fellows
Supervised lay providers; lead group sessions
Four sessions that lead to lasting impact.
A simple, structured journey meeting young people where they are — and supporting them towards recovery and flourishing.
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Sign up
Young people sign up through their schools — and other community settings. Sign up happens through partnerships with schools, teachers, local communities, and government partners. Any young person can sign up, overcoming stigma and strengthening community.
Two paths to reach every young person
We are building to serve all young people in need. We scale our model directly, but importantly through enabling government and community partners. Whether we deliver directly or enable partners, the model stays the same — clinically effective, technology-powered, and built for scale.
Shamiri Hubs
We run it.
We set up semi-autonomous units that serve young people around a cluster of schools. Each Hub serves up to 20,000 young people annually.
Shamiri Partners
Others run it.
We set up Hubs that county governments and partner organizations take over to deliver care using our training, technology, and quality systems. Shamiri builds and maintains the infrastructure and systems — including training, technology, and fidelity. Partners provide reach, workforce, and sustained funding. This is how you get to millions.
See the results
Designed in Africa, built for the world. A model born from the Global South — now ready to scale everywhere.
Featured research
shamiriAI for Supervision Pilot Validation Study
We developed and pilot-validated shamiriAI, an automated fidelity monitoring tool for lay-delivered mental health interventions, embedded within the Shamiri school-based mental health program in Kenya. shamiriAI demonstrates technically feasible multilingual ASR and a coherent, interpretable reliability profile. Underperformance was concentrated on holistic inferential dimensions — particularly Required Contents and Clarity — while structured detection tasks already approach operational utility. The underperformance pattern reflects diagnosable misalignments in rubric interpretation and prompt design, with clear engineering solutions identified. These findings provide the foundational validation evidence and dimension-specific diagnostics needed to guide the development of AI-augmented supervision for lay-delivered adolescent mental health programs in sub-Saharan Africa and other multilingual settings.
Randomized controlled trial of the Shamiri intervention
A randomized trial of 413 Kenyan adolescents found that Shamiri, a 4-week lay-provider-delivered intervention, produced greater reductions in depression and anxiety symptoms at posttreatment (d = 0.35 for depression, d = 0.37 for anxiety) and sustained effects through 7-month follow-up.
Pilot randomized trial of Shamiri in Kibera
A pilot RCT of 51 Kenyan adolescents in an urban slum found that the Shamiri intervention produced greater reductions in depression (d = .32) and anxiety (d = .54) compared to study skills control, and improved academic performance.