About 25% of the world’s population is children and adolescents.  These are the formative years critical for a child’s overall development and growth. Physical, emotional and social determinants, including poverty, violence, or other negative experiences can make them vulnerable to faltering development and mental health problems. 12 % of children have a developmental disability (Arora 2018), and one in ten children aged 5-16 have a diagnosable mental health condition. Importantly, half of all adult mental health problems start by the age of 14.

Source: Mental health taskforce 2016

Despite this glaring data, most developmental disorders and childhood mental health problems remain undetected and untreated due to low awareness and lack of adequate healthcare access. Sangath started its journey as a traditional facility based multidisciplinary child guidance clinic with a range of clinicians, including a paediatrician, a speech therapist, a psychiatrist, psychologists and special educators. Over the years, our work has focused on public health research which can generate solutions that can reach families and children where they live in communities. This has been in the form of designing universal parenting interventions while also developing digital tools which can help us detect children who are faltering in their development, allowing for early interventions. 

Our strategies include 

• Developing and evaluating digital assessments
• Developing and evaluating interventions
• Implementing programs at scale