“If we can understand which resources limit depression, we can work with youth to break the cycle,” says UP’s Prof Linda Theron, who is leading a five-year study on youth resilience in Africa.

Professor Linda Theron of the Department of Educational Psychology at the University of Pretoria (UP) recently received a research grant that many researchers, especially social scientists, can only dream of.

UK-based global charitable foundation Wellcome is funding her research on youth resilience to the tune of £5 million (about R116 million). The project involves seven co-investigators, and spans Canada, the UK, Nigeria and South Africa over five years. Prof Theron, an internationally acclaimed researcher with a B1 rating by the National Research Foundation, is the principal investigator.

Africa is the continent with the fastest-growing youth population, yet one in five young people in Africa is not in education, employment or training (NEET), making them disproportionately vulnerable to depression. In Nigeria and South Africa, the two research sites, the proportion is even higher, with at least one in three young people being NEET (36.7% and 34.3% respectively).

“If we can understand which resources limit depression, we can work with youth to break the cycle,” Prof Theron says.

The investment of time, money and resources in this study is so extensive because it will investigate factors at multiple system levels, and has the potential to have an immense impact on African youth.

The research project aims to protect these young people against depression and, more specifically, to investigate what enables resilience. What makes the study groundbreaking is that it is exploring these aspects across multiple systems: the researchers will be studying NEET youth in terms of their physical, psychological, social, ecological and economic risks and resources.

Even the funders have labelled it an ambitious programme.

Prof Theron says the prevalence of depressed young people is problematic because it means that Africa is unlikely to reap the economic and social benefits of its fast-growing youth population. Poverty, hopelessness and unemployment can easily become a continuous, vicious cycle that youth do not have the mental well-being or support to transcend.

“To put it into an even bigger context, by 2030, African young people will constitute 42% of the world's youth. So if one in five of that 42% is NEET, and depressed, they can’t easily contribute economically or socially. And if they can't contribute, Africa will continue to face significant challenges. That then spills over into multiple challenges for the rest of the world. It was President Joe Biden who said: ‘Africa's success is the world's success.’”

The research will be conducted in two phases. The first looks at 1 600 NEET youth aged 18 to 24 in stressed communities in Nigeria’s Niger Delta and in Gauteng in South Africa. During this phase, the risks and resources that play into depression will be investigated.

The second phase will be an in-depth study of 500 of those who reported the highest risks yet the lowest depression, versus those with the highest risks and highest depression. Here, researchers will include indicators such as stress hormone levels; allostatic load (cumulative burden of chronic stress and life events on physical and mental health); environmental factors such as air quality, noise levels and temperature; economic factors; and psycho-social factors such as political, social and cultural contexts.

“That multisystemic combination requires a multidisciplinary team of experts,” says Prof Theron, who has assembled an international team. Together with other collaborators such as Prof Karmel Choi of Harvard Medical School in the US, most of the researchers came to UP in February last year to conceptualise the study. “We sat in one room for a week,” Prof Theron adds.

She outlined the expertise each participant brings to the study:

• University of Ibadan, Nigeria: Prof Olufunmilayo Fawole, a public health medicine and epidemiological expertise, and Prof Olanrewaju “Lanre” Olaniyan, an economics expert;
• University of Leicester, UK: Dr Zainab Mai-Bornu, “a political scientist using innovative videography methodology”, and Dr Diane Levine, a former South African and sociologist-criminologist who does “novel, digital qualitative work” and brings cultural sensitivity from her extensive work experience across Africa and other majority world contexts;
• University of Nottingham, UK: Prof Dov Stekel, a computational biologist who “brings cutting-edge mathematical modelling and the capacity to work across disciplines using a wide range of statistical models”; and
• South African Medical Research Council: Prof Caradee Wright, a chief specialist scientist in environment and health, “who will lead work packages measuring environmental factors like air quality and temperature, and interpret how they play into the depression of participants”.

The seventh co-investigator is Prof Theron’s long-time collaborator Prof Michael Ungar of Dalhousie University in Canada. They have been research partners since 2008, most recently as co-leads on a five-year $2million (about R36 million) multi-systemic study in Canada and South Africa, working with young people living in politically and economically volatile communities.

“He is the world’s leading resilience researcher, particularly regarding the idea of multi-systemic resource combinations,” Prof Theron says. “He brings decades of experience as a clinical social worker, and I bring a psychology background, so our disciplines dovetail well.”

Add in “trusted, very-well respected community partners” – which is how Prof Theron refers to the South African Depression and Anxiety Group and the Regional Psychosocial Support Initiatives – and the project looks set to have a rippling impact. These partners will help set up the study, recruit participants and package the research outcomes.

“In this way, the messaging that comes out of the study will be taken up by service providers who are on the ground, but also by the government,” says Prof Theron.