With an NYU Changemaker Fellowship, PhD Candidate Moiyattu Banya is partnering with a non-profit serving girls in post-conflict Sierra Leone.
New York, NY – Over twenty years after the end of Sierra Leone’s ten-year civil war, the country’s adolescent girls are experiencing high rates of gender-based violence (GBV) as well as high school dropout and teenage pregnancy. PhD candidate Moiyattu Banya, who fled the war-torn country at age 12 and settled in the United States as a refugee, is committed to bringing change to her homeland, and especially to its girls. With a $10,000 NYU Bañuelos Family Changemaker Fellowship, Moiyattu will engage in a 10-week research internship with Rainbo, a non-profit organization serving survivors of GBV in Sierra Leone’s capital, Freetown.
Moiyattu noted that girls have been found three times more likely to be depressed than boys, yet African girls are generally left out of global mental health research. “These findings coupled with my practical and lived experience motivated me to focus on the mental health and well-being of girls in Sierra Leone, specifically their exposure to potentially traumatic events.” These experiences led her to co-found the organization Girls Empowerment Sierra Leone in 2012 and to center her doctoral dissertation on uncovering factors affecting depression and well-being among adolescent girls in the country’s post-conflict context.
Moiyattu’s dissertation research will include surveys of girls in Sierra Leone to quantify the kind of traumatic experiences they have had and how they relate to depression. She will also conduct interviews to further explore girls’ experiences of trauma, depression, well-being, and coping.
During her internship, Moiyattu will pilot test her research tools. “Testing these instruments, coupled with stakeholder discussions, will lead to insights on how to tailor my research methodologies for my dissertation to be culturally relevant and impactful,” she said. While there, she will also train Rainbo staff in using evidence-based tools to enhance the psychosocial support they provide to GBV survivors and the education they provide to both girls and boys on GBV prevention.
Ultimately, Moiyattu’s goal is to use her research to develop culturally and contextually relevant interventions to support the mental health of girls and adolescents across West Africa. She explained, “One of the reasons I decided to pursue my PhD was that after years of working with Girls Empowerment Sierra Leone(GESL), I realized we needed to understand more about how girls are experiencing their environment and the toll that it takes on their mental health. And then what are the tools and resources that are truly needed to make them go even further than our organization’s work can take them?”
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