Advancing adolescent mental well-being to shape India’s future

The Opportunity

Advancing adolescent mental well-being to shape India’s future

Adolescence is a critical window to shape lifelong well-being.

Adolescence is a phase of transition, socially and developmentally, when young people build the emotional, social and cognitive capabilities that carry them into adult life. It is also when mental health conditions begin: half of all of them start by age 14. With over 25 crore adolescents in India, supporting their mental well-being early is one of the most lasting ways to help them, and the communities and economy they will go on to shape, thrive.

Making well-being part of growing up.

Most adolescents go through stretches of distress. It is common, but often goes unnoticed and unsupported. The right support early helps young people cope and feel better. Without it, some distress deepens into crisis. Upstream support prevents that, and makes distress easier to manage when it does happen.

The most effective place to start is where adolescents already are. Schools reach young people every day, in the setting where they learn, form friendships and face pressure, so support can be part of everyday life, and not a separate service they have to seek out. Strengthening the systems around adolescents, starting with schools, could make mental well-being an integral part of growing up.

Our Support

Partners

Our Approach

Aikyam works to catalyse systems-level change in adolescent mental health

Scalable demonstrations

We partner with governments and implementing organisations to design, test and demonstrate evidence-based models for adolescent mental health promotion, prevention and early support.

Our focus is on identifying what works, addressing implementation challenges and developing pathways for effective solutions to be adopted and sustained within public systems, particularly schools.

Public goods

We work with governments and ecosystem stakeholders to strengthen the policy and institutional environment for adolescent mental health.

Through evidence-based advocacy, strategic partnerships and policy engagement, we aim to shape public priorities, strengthen institutional capacity and ownership, and enable the policy and financing conditions required for sustainable, population-scale impact.

Policy and advocacy

We translate evidence and insights from our demonstrations and policy engagement into public goods that address critical knowledge and capacity gaps across the adolescent mental health ecosystem.

Through shared resources, we aim to strengthen ecosystem capacity, inform decision-making and enable institutions to adopt and scale effective approaches.