23/07/2026
Day 3 Report: 1st WEALTH and 2nd CAMH Conference 2026, Wednesday, 22 July 2026, College of Medicine, University of Ibadan
Three days ago, this was a room filled with people from different countries and institutions. Today, it is a room of collaborators, friends, and colleagues, carrying ideas, and half-finished conversations they will pick up long after they leave Ibadan. Across three days of workshops, plenaries, posters, and roundtables, something quieter than the data was also being built: trust between people who had never worked together before Monday morning. If the first two days laid the groundwork, today was the high point, the day the conference gathered everything it had built and brought it to a close.
The day began at the Library Extension Foyer with Poster Session II (Part 2), chaired by Dr Kwabena Kusi-Mensah and Dr Oluwabunmi Fola-Bolumole. Two posters stood out. Davidson C. Johnson, presenting on behalf of Abu Samuel Ezekiel and colleagues, shared a cross-sectional study of 340 adolescents in Ibadan North Local Government Area on youth-friendly health services, finding that age, ethnicity, educational level, household type, and maternal education all significantly predicted how satisfied adolescents were with the services available to them, with mid-adolescents from monogamous households reporting the highest satisfaction. The same team also presented a systematic review of 55 studies on gender-based violence and mental health among adolescent girls in southwest Nigeria, using a five-compartment mathematical model that estimated a baseline reproduction number of 1.87, meaning the burden of gender-based violence linked mental illness is currently self-sustaining. Encouragingly, their simulation showed that a 30% reduction in exposure combined with a 50% improvement in treatment access could bring that figure below the critical threshold of 1.0.
The morning's centrepiece was the Roundtable on Career Trajectories of Women in Health Research and Policy, an early career, in-conversation format moderated by Dr Iyeyinka Kusi-Mensah with Professor Olufunmilayo I. Fawole. Professor Fawole, recognised among the world's top scientists in the Stanford-Elsevier rankings for five consecutive years, walked participants through a career that began with her MBBS in 1987 and did not include a PhD until 2019, over three decades later, after a chance meeting with a South African mentor at a conference. She traced her pivot from STI and HIV research into gender-based violence prevention, despite pushback from peers who expected her to remain within traditional infectious disease research, and spoke about the Girls Invest project, which paired GBV education with direct economic empowerment by funding school fees, national exam costs, and vocational start-up tools for girls. She was candid about combining motherhood with academic work, from children doing homework at the dining table while she typed, to writing papers poolside during swimming lessons, and credited her late husband and the domestic staff she supported through education for making that possible. On rejection, her advice was simple: give it one night, then let it go. Discussion from the floor also touched on whether women in leadership risk being seen as overly controlling, which Professor Fawole rejected as a question of individual personality rather than gender, and on whether women already enjoy equal opportunity in institutions like UCH, a claim she pushed back on given persistent structural bias at the highest levels nationally and globally.
After the tea break, four Parallel Workshops ran alongside one another. In Track A, Professor Jason Madan and Kamran Khan led "Developing Decision Models for Economic Evaluation: A Practical Exercise," taking participants through decision tree and Markov model construction, incremental cost-effectiveness ratios, and probabilistic sensitivity analysis, using a worked comparison of supportive counselling against standard care for young people at risk of depression. In Track B, Professor Bidemi Yusuf and Professor Emmanuel Bakare facilitated "Compartmental Models of Depression Dynamics," a hands-on exercise in building and labelling a decision tree, beginning with a worked example of a "Supportive Counselling" decision node branching into a chance node for whether a depressive episode occurs or not. In Track C, Dr Olubukola Omobowale led "How to Successfully Translate Research Findings into Policy and Practice: Lessons from the ENCASE Project," introducing a four-level map of policy targets, from lawmakers to community gatekeepers, and a "finding, so what, the ask" structure for a one-minute policy pitch, illustrated by the ENCASE project's use of thirteen co-produced Hausa radio drama episodes to shift community attitudes on child marriage. In Track D, Chuka Ononye and Oluwaseun Abimbola led a Health Communication workshop for adolescents built around a "Myth Detector" (source, motive, evidence, cross-check) for testing health claims, and a "Health Voice" framework (what, when, how much, who) for describing symptoms and speaking up. Chuka Ononye, Research Uptake and Communications Manager at CCAMH, put it simply: "a myth only survives because nobody stopped to ask a question." Students tested the framework on a real WhatsApp rumour that cold water after a meal causes cancer, and worked in teams to bust myths about detox teas, water intake, and skipping breakfast.
The afternoon's Plenary was delivered by Professor Bidemi Yusuf, Co-Principal Investigator of the WEALTH Project and Contract Statistician at the US CDC, chaired by Professor Fagbamigbe, on "Compartmental Models of Depression Dynamics: A Susceptible-Depressed-Recovered Framework, Implications for Policy." She argued that individuals move between susceptible, depressed, and recovered states in response to life stressors such as violence, marital breakdown, displacement, and economic hardship, with the risk of relapse or depression related mortality along the way, and that models gain value when they are broken down by specific groups, such as early, middle, and late adolescence, rather than treated as one uniform population. She was direct about the limits of imported data: "it is high time we stopped using data from abroad. Abroad does not mirror us." Discussion from the floor, including from retired Ministry of Health official Dr Abass Gbolahan, focused on the need for modellers to be upfront that outputs rest on assumptions and are not "cast in iron." Professor Fagbamigbe summarised the session's spirit: "your model is only as good as the policy it can inform," and reminded the room that politicians "want to see colours... they want a snapshot," not tables of equations. Recommendations included establishing a National Mental Health Modelling Consortium, similar to existing malaria control frameworks, and building interactive, plain-language policy dashboards.
The conference then moved into its Closing Ceremony, which opened with a Closing Address from Convener Professor Olayinka Omigbodun, followed by the reading of the conference Communiqué by postdoctoral researcher Dr Iyeyinka Kusi-Mensah. The ceremony also marked a change of guard: Dr Kwabena Kusi-Mensah formally handed over the presidency of the Africa Association for Child and Adolescent Mental Health (AACAMH) to Dr Ayotunde Omotoso, erstwhile President of the Association of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry and Allied Professionals in Nigeria (ACAPAN), who takes up the AACAMH presidency having just completed his term at the helm of ACAPAN. Dr Omotoso followed with his remarks in his new capacity. The ceremony continued with presentations of appreciation to all plenary speakers, the induction of graduates from the Centre for Child and Adolescent Mental Health into the ACAPAN fold, and awards for the best oral and poster presentations, alongside further recognitions and a vote of thanks. The best oral presentation was “Utilizing Causal Machine Learning Modelling to Tackle Depression and Related Mental Illnesses Among Adolescent Girls and Young Women in Sub-Saharan Africa” by Dr. Damaris Felistus Mulwa, A WEALTH Fellow from Kenya, Lecturer and Researcher from Jomo Kenyatta University of Agriculture and Technology, Kenya, and the best poster presentation was titled “Fostering Fortitude: Literary Interventions for Child and Adolescent Mental Wellbeing in Contemporary Nigerian Children's Literature” by Dr Opeyemi Ajibola, Lecturer from National Open University of Nigeria, Abuja Nigeria.
Three days that opened with AI tools and machine learning workshops, and closed with compartmental models of depression, a candid conversation about what it takes to build a research career as a woman, and a changing of leadership for the region's child and adolescent mental health community, ended, fittingly, with a cocktail reception in the College Quadrangle, a moment to unwind, reconnect, and carry the conversation forward beyond the conference walls.
