About Shamiri

Shamiri means "thrive." We are building a future where all young people can thrive.

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Delivering effective mental health support to all young people, starting in East Africa

Shamiri means "thrive"—and our mission is to build a world where young people can thrive by providing effective mental health care at scale, starting from Africa and reaching worldwide.
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We are Africa's largest youth mental health provider, serving 100,000+ youth every year. Since 2021, we've reached 185,000+ youth, trained and meaningfully employed 3,000+ providers, and demonstrated that a different approach to youth mental health is possible—and works.

Today, almost 1 in 3 young people (ages 10-24) struggle with mental health problems globally. Yet in many places around the world, fewer than 1 in 10 receive treatment.
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Traditional care and prevention models are failing. They're prohibitively expensive, depend on scarce professionals, and rely on overburdened or non-existent infrastructure.
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In response, we've taken a different approach to closing the treatment gap. Shamiri's model is a "for-youth-by-youth" approach that expands the provider pool through task-shifting, emphasizes brief and effective strengths-based interventions, and brings care into communities where young people are. Young people (ages 18-24) deliver group sessions, supervised by semi-professionals, with psychologists and psychiatrists handling escalated care.

Our technology platform (shamiriOS, shamiriAI, Rafi) enables scale while maintaining quality through AI-supported supervision and data-driven improvements. Published research in top-tier journals proves we achieve clinical outcomes comparable to traditional Western models—at a fraction of the cost.
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Our model has emerged as one of the world's most cost-effective youth mental health models at just $7-10 per youth—over 20 times cheaper than traditional therapy.
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We're reimagining what mental health care should look like—accessible, affordable, community-embedded, and built for scale from day one.

Shamiri was founded in 2019 at the Lab for Youth Mental Health at Harvard University with the idea that simple interventions could help young people thrive. We launched in Kenya in 2021 and now serve hundreds of thousands of youth every year.
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Founded: 2019
Headquarter: Nairobi, Kenya
Staff: 50 FTE; 2,000+ Providers

Our Story

Shamiri began with a simple question: What if we could make mental health work for millions of young people who need it but can't access it?

Our founder, Tom Osborn, grew up in rural Kenya, where he witnessed how mental health struggles limited young people's potential and perpetuated cycles of poverty. As a teenager struggling with mental health issues, he participated in a brief intervention that changed his trajectory—showing him that transformation was possible with the right support.
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Building the evidence

As an undergraduate at Harvard, Tom joined Professor John Weisz's Lab for Youth Mental Health, where research showed that brief, strengths-based interventions could produce outcomes comparable to traditional therapy—but could be delivered by lay providers with minimal training.

Working with co-founder Katherine Venturo-Conerly and collaborators from University of Pennsylvania, Stony Brook, Duke, Kenyatta University, and the University of Nairobi, the team spent three years conducting rigorous trials on what would become the Shamiri model.

The results were remarkable: 80% of youth with depression and anxiety achieved clinically meaningful improvement after just four weeks, and the effects lasted. Young people also improved in their social relationships and academic performance.
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Delivering impact-at-scale

Building on this evidence, Shamiri launched as an impact-first organization in 2021 with a clear mission: demonstrate that affordable, scalable mental health care works. Since then, we've scaled from serving 4,000 youth to 100,000 annually. We've built technology infrastructure (shamiriOS and shamiriAI) to maintain quality at scale, established partnerships with county and national governments, and trained thousands of youth providers—creating jobs while building mental health capacity.

But we're just getting started. Our mission is to reach millions of youth annually across Africa, train the next generation of mental health providers, and conduct rigorous research to continuously optimize our model. Our goal is to prove that affordable, effective, community-led mental health care is not just possible—it's replicable across the Global South and beyond.