Zimbabwean mental health organisation Friendship Bench has been selected as an awardee of Action for Women’s Health, a major global initiative supporting organisations working to improve women’s physical and mental health. The initiative was launched by Pivotal, a philanthropic organisation founded by Melinda French Gates, in partnership with Lever for Change. Friendship Bench was selected in November 2025 from thousands of applications submitted by organisations across more than 100 countries, joining a global cohort of just over 80 awardees.
The recognition comes as French Gates announced an additional US$215 million in funding for women’s health in June 2026, taking her total commitment to the sector to more than US$600 million over the past two years. For Friendship Bench, the recognition provides international validation for a model that has placed community based care at the centre of Zimbabwe’s response to mental health challenges. The organisation trains local grandmothers to provide structured, evidence based talk therapy in their communities, often using simple wooden benches as safe spaces for people to discuss their mental health challenges.
The approach seeks to address both limited access to professional mental health services and the stigma that can prevent people from seeking help. By using local languages, familiar community figures and culturally grounded approaches, Friendship Bench has developed a model that has grown from neighbourhoods in Harare into an internationally recognised intervention.
The model has also been replicated in Zambia, Kenya, Malawi and Botswana, extending the reach of an approach developed in Zimbabwe to communities facing similar challenges elsewhere in Africa. French Gates said organisations such as Friendship Bench demonstrate how community led solutions can offer practical responses to mental health challenges that frequently go untreated.
“Organizations like Friendship Bench are doing incredible work to help change that,” she said, highlighting the organisation’s ability to draw on community knowledge to design practical and effective health interventions.
For Dr Esther Tumbare, chief executive of Friendship Bench, the recognition reinforces the organisation’s belief that mental health services can be effective when they are rooted in the communities they seek to serve.
“This recognition through Melinda French Gates’ Action for Women’s Health initiative affirms what we have always known, that community led mental health care works,” Tumbare said.
“Our grandmothers are not just delivering therapy; they are transforming how their communities understand and respond to mental health.”
She said the platform would help Friendship Bench reach more women who might otherwise never seek mental health support.
The award also places Zimbabwean innovation within a broader global conversation about how women’s health can be improved through locally designed solutions rather than approaches imposed from outside communities.
For a country where mental health services have historically faced challenges around access, resources and stigma, Friendship Bench’s international recognition offers a powerful example of how community knowledge can become the foundation of a scalable health intervention.
Its journey from wooden benches in Harare to a global network of replicated programmes also highlights the potential of African organisations to develop solutions that can influence health policy and practice far beyond their countries of origin.
