Youth mental health in Tanzania: Social determinants, climate change, and the impacts of social protection

Poor mental health places a large burden on youth, impacting their physical, social, and financial wellbeing in the present and across the lifespan. Identifying the threats and protective factors to young people’s psychosocial wellbeing and understanding what types of interventions improve their mental health can provide valuable insight for adapting and implementing future policies and programmes.
This thesis uses data from two cluster randomized controlled trials in Tanzania to better understand what factors and interventions influence mental health among a sample of youth living in extreme poverty. First, we identified determinants of depression outcomes, also considering how living in conditions worsened by climate change and feeling distressed over climate change influenced youths’ mental health. Second, we estimated the effects of two social protection programmes— as well as potential pathways of these effects— on measures of depression among these Tanzanian youth. In an age with multiple global crises further straining the social and economic landscape for many young people, this thesis provides a voice to a population of young people living in the margins in the Global South.