Dixon Chibanda is a Zimbabwean psychiatrist and the founder of Friendship Bench, a community mental health programme that has reshaped how the world thinks about closing the treatment gap in low-resource settings.
He is a practising medical doctor and professor of psychiatry and Global Mental Health at the University of Zimbabwe and the London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine, and directs the African Mental Health Research Initiative (AMARI). He has spent much of his career working with community grandmothers at the intersection of biomedical approaches and indigenous knowledge systems to address mental health care gaps. Together with his team, he has replicated the Friendship Bench model across Zimbabwe and internationally, particularly in the USA.
Chibanda has addressed audiences at several international events, where he has introduced the Friendship Bench story to a global audience. He is also the award-winning author of The Friendship Bench: How Fourteen Grandmothers Inspired a Mental Health Revolution, chronicling the programme’s origins and growth into a worldwide movement.