Shamiri Brings Accessible, Contextual Mental Healthcare to Kenyan Youth
Founder Tom Osborn has adapted new psychology research from his lab at Harvard to his home country of Kenya in the hopes of helping a generation of young people process anxiety and depression.
Written by Logan Plaster
The Challenge
For many people, high school is remembered as a time of stress, a perfect storm of social land mines, academic pressures, and hormonal changes. And that’s on a good day.
For Tom Osborn, the CEO & Founder of Shamiri Health, high school wasn’t just challenging, it was scarring. He grew up in Kenya and, like many young people around him, attended a large boarding school that was overcrowded and underfunded. He was bullied physically and psychologically and the academic stress was intense. He lived each day with the belief that doing well in school was his only ticket to a better life.
In the end, he did perform quite well, and after graduation got an actual ticket – to Boston, Massachusetts, where he enrolled at Harvard to study economics and computer science.
In his second year at Harvard, Osborn signed up for a psychology class. It was just a general education course requirement, but what he learned changed his life.
“For the first time, I learned a mental health framework that allowed me to process what I’d experienced in high school,” says Osborn. “The bullying I’d experienced was intense, and it wasn’t unique to me. It opened my mind to how many people around me were struggling with anxiety and depression.”
Suddenly Osborn had a new lens, and language, that could help him process his own feelings and trauma. That revelation opened his mind to how he could help other young people back in Kenya. He dug into the research and learned that one in three kids in Kenya report having gone through similar experiences.
He knew what he had to do. He needed to move back to Kenya and make mental health services more effective and accessible for young people.
Shamiri: Early Steps
Step one was to clarify a therapeutic framework. Osborn joined the Lab for Youth Mental Health at Harvard that was working on how to shorten the length of the typical therapy program. Specifically, they were exploring whether a 12-week program could be shortened to four weeks. The work resonated with Osborn deeply because he felt in the Kenyan context, time-intensive therapies were creating a barrier for young people.
The lab discovered that fewer, and shorter, interventions could be as effective as longer ones. They also keyed in on the power of strengths-oriented interventions rather than deficit-oriented interventions.
“Rather than trying to identify and improve your deficits could we figure out what your strengths are and try to strengthen those and hope that they'd have a cascading effect on improving your deficits,” says Osborn.
Armed with this knowledge, and with a burning desire to take research out of the lab and into the real world, Osborn moved home to Kenya and launched Shamiri Institute (Shamiri means thrive in Swahili).
Under the Hood
Initially, Shimiri focused on in-person therapy in four-week cycles, targeting young people and using the framework developed by the Harvard lab. They focused on strengths, tapping into an individual’s sense of purpose, gratitude, and mindset.
Osborn quickly realized that there was a key element missing: community.
“The Kenyan context is more social compared to the US, so that led to a shift towards group-based interventions that could be deployed in schools, colleges, and workplaces. We want to meet young people where they are because having to leave school to go access mental health resources adds another barrier.”
After rolling out in-person therapy programs in 2024, Osborn and his team reworked a digital platform called Rafi, which is named after the Swahili word ‘rafiki’ for friend. The platform has three core functions: it allows people to build their own community, fill out critical health surveys and do daily check-ins. A generative AI component turns check-ins into quick, engaging content like mood boards. People can use the platform to sign up for group therapy sessions, get matched with a therapist, or just work through a self-guided intervention.
When Osborn first launched Shamiri, he assumed that there weren’t nearly enough caregivers and therapists to take care of the vast number of patients. After all, the average age in Kenya is 19 years old. What he discovered instead was that there were many, many people at the community level, from parents to teachers to coaches to clergy, who were already performing many of these counselor-like functions. So Osborn decided to mobilize these folks and create a way to triage problems upstream when necessary.
Another key piece of the Shamiri’s model is research and evidence. Osborn and his team have gotten millions of dollars in grant funding to study youth mental health and perform randomized controlled trials (RCTs). The results have been promising.
“We’ve shown a significant reduction in depression and anxiety symptoms, comparable to traditional one-on-one psychotherapy.”
To date, Shamiri has served more than 130,000 young people in high schools since they launched in 2021. Their school-based model is currently priced at about $7 per person. This makes Shamiri’s model one of the most cost-effective forms of mental healthcare on the continent and aims to get that price even lower to $5 per youth. Through Rafi and one-on-one therapy, Shamiri has expanded their care to Kenyans outside of high schools. Shamiri’s therapy packages are priced at approximately $30 per month. When patients are on-boarded to their therapy sessions, they are also on-boarded to Rafi and given access to the full suite of virtual services.
Final Word
For Tom Osborn, helping thousands of Kenyan high schoolers work through their anxiety and depression is a true full-circle experience. He’s right back where he started, but this time, he’s got the chance to change how an entire generation processes their stress and trauma.
When asked about the impact he’s making, one particular story stands out for Osborn.
“It was 2019, right before COVID, and we were doing one of our research trials. This young woman was in the program and she was highly suicidal. She’d been in and out of school for a long time. We walked through the four-week program with her and continued to track her through 2020. Then we lost track of her and I thought that was the end of the story. Fast forward to 2023 when I was meeting a new group of our peer-to-peer providers – called Fellows – and there she was. She’d become a peer leader and was leading group sessions. She’d connected so much with the work that she wanted to be a part of it for someone else.”
Osborn and his team at Shamiri are already having a wide impact in Kenya, but because they’ve built a smart tech stack, there’s room to scale. There’s even talk of franchising. We’ll be excited to see where they take this platform in the coming year as members of StartUp Health’s Mental & Behavioral Health Moonshot Community.
Connect with Shamiri Health via email
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Published: Feb 21, 2025
