About the keynote

Creating space for community healing with grandmothers.  

About the speaker

Dixon Chibanda is a psychiatrist from Zimbabwe and founder of the Friendship Bench. The Friendship Bench Project aims to reduce the mental health treatment gap by training lay people to use a cognitive behavioural therapy based approach to address mental health problems such as depression and anxiety.

​He started the Friendship Bench in Harare in 2006, training grandmothers to deliver mental health care by meeting patients and talking on a bench. Today, the intervention has been refined and scaled up in Africa and internationally. 

Dixon Chibanda holds a PhD from the University of Capetown (UCT) and is an associate professor at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine (LSHTM) - Department of Global Mental Health.

Read more about the friendship bench and watch a video introduction by Professor Chibanda here: https://www.friendshipbenchzimbabwe.org/about-us