Friendship Bench Zimbabwe
Friendship Bench Zimbabwe provides sustainable community-based psychological interventions that are evidence-based, accessible, and scalable.
Friendship Bench Zimbabwe’s mission is to get people out of kufungisisa – depression & anxiety – by creating safe spaces and a sense of belonging in communities to improve mental wellbeing and enhance quality of life. Guided by their values of empathy and connection, and anchored in over a decade of rigorous research (including an RCT published in the Journal of American Medical Association, JAMA) they have re-imagined the delivery of evidence-based mental healthcare.
Vision
A Friendship Bench within walking distance for all.
Mission
To get people
out of depression.
Values
Empathy and connection,
anchored in research.
How does Friendship Bench Zimbabwe work?
Friendship Bench Zimbabwe trains community health workers (also known as lay health workers) in partnership with the Ministry of Health and Child Care to provide basic Cognitive Behavioural Therapy with an emphasis on Problem Solving Therapy, activity scheduling and peer led group support. This task shifting approach means they can deliver an effective, affordable and sustainable solution to bridge the mental health treatment gap at a primary care level.
When people visit the Friendship Bench they are screened with a locally validated tool called the Shona Symptom Questionnaire (SSQ-14). If a person scores above the cut off point, they are suggested to stay and receive the one-on-one problem solving therapy. After the one-on-one talk therapy, people are introduced to a peer led support group known as Circle Kubatana Tose (CKT), meaning ‘holding hands together’.
Friendship Bench Zimbabwe by the numbers
$16.50
our estimate of the cost to provide a course of one-to-one therapy to 1 person
0.80 WELLBY
our estimated impact per course of therapy
$21
estimated cost to create 1 WELLBY
295,770
people treated in 2024
You can learn more about WELLBYs here.
Why do we recommend Friendship Bench Zimbabwe?
To assess Friendship Bench we conducted a systematic review and meta-analysis of the academic literature of psychotherapy in low- and middle-income countries, and then combined this with the evidence from Friendship Bench’s own programmes. Friendship Bench is one of two organisations we conducted the deepest research on. We rate it as a top charity because it is highly cost-effective at improving global wellbeing and we are confident about our analysis. You can find the full (~200 page) report here.
