Uganda Releases National Guidelines for Mental Health in Schools

Uganda’s Ministry of Education and Sports has released new national Guidelines for Integrating Mental Wellbeing and Psychosocial Support in Education Institutions, a first-of-its-kind framework built to bring structure to a crisis playing out in classrooms across the country. 

StrongMinds Uganda partnered with UNESCO and the Ministry to co-fund and help develop the guidelines, contributing grassroots experience and clinical expertise gained through more than a decade of delivering group therapy in Ugandan schools and communities. The Ministry recognized StrongMinds’ “pioneering work in mental health advocacy” as central to ensuring the guidelines “address real-world challenges faced by our learning institutions.”

The guidelines are intended to provide comprehensive guidance for integrating mental health and psychosocial support services in all education institutions in Uganda, ensuring systematic, evidence-based, and culturally appropriate interventions that promote the mental wellbeing of learners and staff nationwide. They establish standardized frameworks for mental health promotion and psychosocial support, including referral pathways connecting schools to community and clinical care, building on a 2022 Ministry directive that first mandated weekly mental health hours in schools but left many administrators without practical guidance on implementation.

For StrongMinds, the guidelines mark a significant step toward embedding depression care into the systems young people encounter every day, turning years of programmatic experience into national policy.