I am cycling with friends to raise money for the Brain Gain Project at Butabika Hospital, Kampala, Uganda. Setting out on 4th April 2017. Yes, the rainy season. Starting from Rwanda, the land of thousand hills, going to Tanzania, Malawi and onwards. We are heading somewhere south of the Equator. Follow the blog to find out where we end up.

About the Brain Gain Project:

I have had the privilege of working for the Brain Gain Project at Butabika Hospital for the last 10 months. The project has been funded through the Health Partnership Scheme, which is in turn funded by the UK Department for International Development (DFID) and managed by the Tropical Health and Education Trust (THET). The peer working scheme trains ex-patients to provide home visits and ward-based outreach in Kampala, improving the scale and quality of service provision while tackling stigma and discrimination.

The success of this initial programme (2012-13) resulted in the inception of Africa’s first Mental Health Recovery College in 2015, the extension of the Peer Working scheme into the wards of Butabika Hospital, and capacity-building for regional mental health services to apply peer working in their contexts. The Recovery College offers recovery-oriented training and education courses to patients, staff, carers and the general public. These courses are co-produced by trained staff and experts by experience, and revolve around Ugandan recovery themes.

We are raising funds to keep the work at BREC going until September 2017, to complete an evaluation of the programme (1st rigorous evaluation of formal peer support work in sub-Saharan Africa), undertaken as a collaboration between colleagues at the Centre for Global Mental Health of London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, and Peer Support Workers and staff at Butabika Hospital. This is a unique example of a mental health project engaging people with lived experience of mental illness as evaluators, rather than research subjects.