£5.3m Wellcome boost to scale Zimbabwe’s Friendship Bench worldwide

King’s College London has announced a £5.3 million Wellcome Mental Health Award to optimize and scale the digital version of Zimbabwe’s globally acclaimed Friendship Bench mental health intervention, expanding its reach in Zimbabwe and internationally.

The funding will support the further development of Inuka, the digital adaptation of the Friendship Bench, enabling the community-based psychological intervention to reach more people in low-resource settings where access to formal mental health care remains limited.

Developed in Zimbabwe by world-renowned psychiatrist Professor Dixon Chibanda, the Friendship Bench uses trained community health workers, rather than specialist clinicians, to deliver structured 45-minute counselling sessions on simple wooden benches embedded within local communities. The intervention targets common mental health conditions such as anxiety and depression, combining culturally grounded approaches with evidence-based therapy.

According to King’s College London, the Friendship Bench has already reached over one million people, expanding from Zimbabwe to countries including Botswana, Kenya, Malawi, Zambia, Zanzibar, Colombia, El Salvador, Germany, Jordan, the United Kingdom, the United States, and Vietnam.

The five-year research program, which began in November 2025, will be led by Professor Chibanda through a joint appointment at the University of Zimbabwe and the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, working in close partnership with King’s College London. Co-investigators include Professor Melanie Abas, Professor Kimberley Goldsmith, and researchers from King’s Institute of Psychiatry, Psychology and Neuroscience and its Faculty of Social Science and Public Policy.

The project will focus on optimizing the digital Friendship Bench in collaboration with people with lived experience of mental health challenges, ensuring the intervention remains accessible, adaptable across cultures, and effective at scale.

Professor Melanie Abas, Director of the King’s Global Health Institute, said the award strengthens a long-standing reciprocal partnership with Zimbabwean institutions, aimed at reducing global inequities in access to mental health care while building shared capacity in digital health research.

Professor Kimberley Goldsmith said the program will apply advanced evaluation methods to better understand the mechanisms that make the intervention effective, guiding its adaptation in different contexts.

The research forms part of the Wellcome Mental Health Award program, “Accelerating scalable digital mental health interventions,” and will run over the next five years.

For Zimbabwe, the announcement marks another major global endorsement of a homegrown innovation that has reshaped how mental health care can be delivered affordably, respectfully, and at scale, starting from a wooden bench and now moving decisively into the digital world.