Identifying promising, potentially feasible school-based universal mental health programmes for children aged 6 to 9 years in low-income and middle-income countries: A scoping review

Africa, consisting mostly of LMICs, has more contributing factors that lead to increased mental health risk and high burden of disease in children which is not surprising when further evidence similarly showed that in SSA there are numerous social determinants that may impact child mental health. Furthermore, SA research findings revealed a significant prevalence of poor mental health in youth aged 9-19 years. Due to the lack of research with younger children in SA there are no clear indications on how to respond to the mental health promotion needs of and prevention strategies for at-risk SA children aged 6-9 years. To date, various universal intervention strategies have been developed to promote mental health among children and adolescents. However, regardless of the mental health burden and despite the early symptomology of anxiety and depression in SA children reported, there is limited evidence on contextually appropriate universal school-based mental health programmes for this age group within South Africa. Therefore, the objective of this scoping review is to identify promising, potentially feasible school-based universal mental health programmes for children aged 6 to 9 years in LMICs. The intended outcome is to identify promising school-based universal mental health programmes from which we can select one intervention for our context for application in future phases of the research project which includes the adaptation, and feasibility and acceptability testing of the selected programme. The study comprises of four separate phases whereby this being Phase 1 will utilise scoping review methodology. The JBI scoping review framework developed by Arksey and O'Malley, with enhancements proposed by Levac et al., will be utilised.