This year, we acknowledge UNICEF with a Global Impact Award. 

Mental health is one of the most pressing public health challenges of our time. While we mostly develop and implement our solutions in countries that have mature mental health policies, frameworks and funding, the barriers that arise particularly for adolescents and young adults in low- to middle-income countries cannot be discounted. The varying difficulties encountered require not just passion but innovation to overcome unforeseeable complexities such as political support, policies, and stigma. Additional hurdles include equity of access, privacy and confidentiality standards, technical maturity, and a workforce trained in evidence-based treatments. 

Imagine a young person in Kazakhstan or a Ukrainian refugee who often struggles in silence, now empowered to seek support from a trusted counsellor. This is the transformative impact we honour with this award – UNICEF’s, uSupport platform.

uSupport addresses these challenges head-on. It is an innovative digital mental health platform designed to reduce stigma and provide safe, accessible, and anonymous support to young people navigating mental health challenges. With features that offer ongoing support while maintaining complete anonymity, it is revolutionizing the way young people engage with mental health services. Open-source and highly scalable, the uSupport platform is built to support hundreds of countries. It reduces operational costs for low- to middle-income nations, ensuring that mental health support is affordable and accessible while centralizing technical, security and compliance requirements.  

Young people piloting the solution in Central Asia report that they feel more comfortable and safer using uSupport. Its ability to provide targeted support to some of the most marginalized groups in the world is not only commendable but essential. 

Providers are excited that there is now an offering that they can reliably use to connect with more young people. 

The private sector and industry partners now have a channel to transparently see how their sponsorships are delivering real services using a unique and innovative coupon system. 

The platform’s unique and innovative coupon system facilitates results-based funding opportunities for sponsors by providing real-time service delivery metrics. 

3rd party vendors like Spotify, Wysa and 7Cups have also shown interest in having their services available through this platform. And finally, governments now have a reliable platform to deliver their mental health and psychosocial programs to young people. 

uSupport has been built over the last two years and is currently being implemented in Kazakhstan and Poland. With more countries eager to pilot this solution, it has the potential to reach millions of young people, breaking new ground in the fight for accessible mental health care. 

For its vision, innovation, and unwavering commitment to breaking down barriers in mental health care, we are proud to honour UNICEF with this award and look forward to the continued expansion of this exciting platform.

Congratulations UNICEF!