Shamiri Institute, a Kenyan mental health startup, has announced that it has raised $1 million from the Templeton World Charity Foundation.
This funding will help identify ways of expanding and disseminating Shamiri’s character-based interventions to as many Kenyan adolescents as possible and to investigate the long-term health outcomes of these interventions.
Shamiri Institute was co-founded in 2018 at Harvard University by award-winning Kenyan entrepreneur Tom Osborn and rising global mental health researcher Katherine Venturo-Conerly.
“The support from the Templeton World Charity Foundation is truly remarkable for us,” Tom said, “our team’s work has involved developing and testing simple, scalable, and stigma-free mental health treatments that are delivered by lay-providers across Kenya.
“Over the past three years, we have established that our interventions reduce depression and anxiety by up to 40% — which is comparable to or greater than existing psychotherapies — and are importantly cost-effective. With this new funding, we look forward to identifying mechanisms of expanding character strength interventions to thousands of Kenyan youths.”
“With the support from Templeton, we look forward to investigating whether our character strength intervention improves long-term health outcomes and which outcomes it improves.
“Our work will be one of the first to test the effects of character strength interventions across such a rich range of health outcomes over such an extended period. We look forward to sharing our findings with the world,” Katherine remarked.
