About us
The Mental Health Data Prize Africa (MHDPA) is an initiative led by the African Population and Health Research Center (APHRC) in partnership with Wellcome. It was launched in 2023 to foster transformative change in how mental health challenges, particularly anxiety,
depression, and psychosis are understood, prevented, treated, and managed across the African continent.

MHDPA brings together a diverse and multidisciplinary community of African researchers, data scientists, innovators, policymakers, and people with lived experience of mental health conditions. By leveraging existing datasets and applying advanced data science,
implementation science, and evidence-based methodologies, the initiative drives scalable, data-driven solutions tailored to African contexts. Its core mission is to generate actionable insights, innovative tools, and evidence that meaningfully improve mental health
outcomes while strengthening data capacity on the continent.

What We Do
The Mental Health Data Prize Africa (MHDPA) accelerates innovation and evidence generation for mental health in Africa through data-driven research, collaboration, and capacity building.

Key activities include:

• Prize Support: MHDPA awards funding, mentorship, and technical support to multidisciplinary African teams innovating with existing mental health data to better understand and address anxiety, depression, and psychosis.
•  Capacity Building: The initiative runs training and mentorship programmes to strengthen skills in data science, advanced analytics, machine learning, evidence-based decision-making, and implementation science for researchers and practitioners working on mental health issues.
• Community & Research Engagement: MHDPA fosters collaboration across disciplines and sectors, bringing together researchers, data experts, clinicians, policymakers, and people with lived experience to ensure research is relevant, ethically grounded, and impactful.
•  Data Access & Use: The project supports the identification, curation, and responsible use of existing African mental health datasets, enabling teams to generate powerful evidence and tools for policy, diagnosis, treatment, and care.

Through these activities, MHDPA aims to produce scalable solutions and data-driven insights that inform policy and practice, strengthen mental health systems, and improve quality of care across the continent.