FRIENDSHIP BENCH ZIMBABWE

Friendship Bench Zimbabwe is a Non-Governmental Organisation registered in Zimbabwe as a Private Voluntary Organisation, PVO 12/21, with the Department of Social Services. Its vision is a Friendship Bench within walking distance for everyone, and its mission is deceptively simple: get people out of kufungisisa, the Shona term for "thinking too much," used locally to describe depression and anxiety, by creating safe spaces and a sense of belonging within communities.

The model is anchored in over a decade of rigorous scientific research, including a landmark randomised clinical trial published in the Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA), one of the most respected medical journals in the world. That evidence base is precisely what has allowed a mental health intervention delivered by grandmothers on park benches to be taken seriously by governments, universities and global health funders alike.

Zimbabwe faces a mental health treatment gap that is stark even by regional standards. At the time Friendship Bench began, the country had only a handful of trained psychiatrists serving a population of well over ten million people, the overwhelming majority of them concentrated in the capital, Harare, leaving rural and peri-urban communities with virtually no access to specialist mental health support at all.

Depression and anxiety, compounded by economic hardship, health crises and social upheaval, remain widespread across Zimbabwe, yet stigma keeps many people from seeking help, and a formal, clinic-based mental health system built solely around psychiatrists and psychologists was never going to be able to reach the people who needed it most. Friendship Bench's founder, Dr Dixon Chibanda, has spoken candidly about his own early scepticism, admitting he initially doubted that grandmothers without formal medical training could deliver an effective mental health intervention, a very Western, biomedical assumption that the programme's results would go on to overturn entirely..

Friendship Bench's evolution over two decades tells a story of deliberate, evidence-led scale-up: from a small research pilot, to real-world validation through rigorous clinical trials, to structured national scale-up, and now to full system integration through phased technical assistance and formal government transition. Since 2019, Friendship Bench Zimbabwe has partnered directly with the Government of Zimbabwe's Ministry of Health and Child Care under the country's National Strategic Plan for Mental Health Services, specifically under Objective 2 (improving mental health awareness and community empowerment), where the Friendship Bench has been formally adopted as a Ministry of Health and Child Care programme. Friendship Bench Zimbabwe is now in the process of handing its model over to the Government of Zimbabwe entirely, positioning government as the long-term "doer at scale" nationally, a deliberate strategy to ensure the intervention's reach outlasts any single organisation or donor relationship. Since 2000, the organisation has also worked with the World Health Organization Zimbabwe office to support the WHO's Special Initiative for Mental Health.

The model's credibility rests on genuine scientific rigor, including a randomised clinical trial published in JAMA, "Effect of a Primary Care–Based Psychological Intervention on Symptoms of Common Mental Disorders in Zimbabwe," led by Dr Dixon Chibanda alongside researchers from the London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine and other international institutions. That evidence base is also what has driven the model's expansion well beyond Zimbabwe's borders, with the Friendship Bench approach now being adapted and implemented in other countries around the world through its global arm, Friendship Bench Global.

Friendship Bench Zimbabwe has been named to the Happier Lives Institute's Top Charities list for 2025, a distinction awarded to organisations whose interventions are shown, through rigorous evidence, to deliver outsized improvements in wellbeing relative to their cost, a recognition that speaks directly to just how efficiently this simple, community-rooted model turns support into genuine, measurable change in people's lives.

Friendship Bench Zimbabwe's current funders include the DRK Foundation, the Mulago Foundation, the Schooner Foundation, Boehringer Ingelheim, and Rippleworks, among other current supporting organisations. Past funders and research partners have included Grand Challenges Canada, SolidarMed, the Inner Foundation, Zoom Cares, the London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine, UNAIDS, Yield Giving, the Global Alliance for Chronic Diseases, the UK Medical Research Council, Evolve, OPHID, King's College London, the Wellcome Trust, the Liverpool School of Tropical Medicine, the US National Institutes of Health, the Children's Investment Fund Foundation, and the Risk Pool Fund. Friendship Bench has worked in close partnership with Zimbabwe's Ministry of Health and Child Care since 2019 and with the World Health Organization since 2000, embedding its model within Zimbabwe's official national mental health strategy.

Every contribution channelled through Fonseca to Friendship Bench Zimbabwe helps train another grandmother, place another wooden bench in another community, and give another person struggling with kufungisisa somewhere safe to sit and be heard. This is an intervention proven, through some of the most rigorous research standards in global health, to work, and proven, through two decades of careful scale-up, to be sustainable well beyond the life of any single grant. Supporting Friendship Bench means investing in a uniquely Zimbabwean solution to a universal problem, one now being adopted well beyond Zimbabwe's own borders, because it turns out that some of the world's best mental healthcare doesn't require a psychiatrist's office at all, just a bench, a willing ear, and a grandmother who has learned how to truly listen.