Institutionalised Children Explorations and Beyond Volume 1, Number 2, September 2014 pp. 193-203 DOI: 10.5958/2349-3011.2014.01184.0 193 1 Student, Duke University, Durham, North Carolina, USA; 2 General Manager, COPE, Kampala, Uganda 3 Clinical Research Coordinator, Medicine/GI, Duke University, Durham, North Carolina, USA 4 Assistant Professor, Duke Global Health Institute, Duke University, Durham, North Carolina, USA *Corresponding author email id: sumi.ariely@duke.edu International Perspective A PATH TO SUSTAINABLE TREATMENTS FOR ORPHANED AND VULNERABLE CHILDREN: LESSONS FROM COMMUNITY-BASED EFFORTS IN UGANDA Craig Moxley 1 , Madelinze McKelway 1 , Samantha Truong 1 , Robinah Nakafeero 2 , Christopher Kigongo 3 , Sumedha Gupta Ariely 4 * ABSTRACT The world’s population of orphaned and vulnerable children (OVC) poses formidable obstacles to global mental health. Because countries that have large OVC populations also tend to be the countries least able to provide children with required psychosocial support, many counselling services tend to be community-based. Our experiences working with Counseling Orphans, Promoting Empowerment (COPE), a community-based OVC counselling programme in Uganda, highlight two major information gaps that such organisations face, namely, a lack of activities and curricula for peer-group counselling sessions and a lack of empirical evaluation framework for assessing their services. In order to address these two needs, we have launched an early version of a website that curates activity guides and evaluation frameworks. In this paper, we highlight the need for such a platform in facilitating a dialogue and information exchange to improve the mental health of the OVC population. Keywords: Orphaned and vulnerable children, Uganda, UNICEF INTRODUCTION The United Nations International Children’s Emergency Fund UNICEF estimates that, in 2009, 153 million of the world’s children had lost one or both parents (UNICEF, 2012). High mortality from disease, poverty and civil conflict are responsible for the large and increasing numbers of orphaned and vulnerable children (OVC). Orphanhood, abandonment and associated civic challenges affect children’s psychosocial well-being and can have debilitating effects that extend into adulthood; the large and growing number of OVCs threatens human welfare and poses formidable obstacles to the global mental health. Uganda is especially threatened by the public health ramifications of orphanhood. Due largely to the AIDS epidemic and to the conflict in the north of the country, Uganda has roughly 2.7 million orphans (UNICEF, 2012) living in a country of 36