Building research capacity for child and adolescent mental health in Africa

There is an urgent need to address the wide disparity between scientific research on Child and Adolescent Mental Health (CAMH) emanating from high-resource settings, and low-resource settings like Africa [1–4]. Africa has a largely youthful population with over 50 % children and adolescents, many of whom live in ‘Exceptionally Difficult Circumstances’ with increased risk for mental disorders [5, 6]. The challenge is to develop both research capacity and to then have the relevant research published in widely disseminated journals.