Child and adolescent (s) mental health problems are a global development priority, however, there are only a few real-world examples of delivering evidence-based child and adolescent (s) mental health care in Low- and Middle-Income Countries (LMICs). A President’s Programme to Promote Mental Health of Pakistanis was launched on the Oct 10, 2019 (Mirza & Rahman, 2019) which focuses on harnessing technology to scale-up school based mental health programmes in Pakistan. Informed by extensive consultations (Hamdani et al, 2021) with national and international child and adolescent (s) mental health experts; health and education sectors stakeholders including parents and children, we developed an online training programme for teachers (Hamdani et al, 2019) to implement evidence-based, WHO endorsed recommendations for promoting child and adolescent mental health in school (www.learnwithshine.org).

In a pilot sub-district of Gujar Khan in Rawalpindi, we trained 320 teachers from 80 public schools in implementing WHO school mental health programme activities. Following the training, teachers demonstrated improved knowledge and skills to promote mental health in schools and identified 2584/9685 (27%) children and adolescents at-risk of poor socio-emotional development. 10 school counsellors have been trained to provide focused psychosocial support to at-risk adolescent in the pilot sub-district.

The President’s Programme has the potential to impact lives of millions of adolescents and could serve a blue-print for mental health delivery model for other countries in the region as well (Rahman & Hamdani, 2021). To understand and address ongoing implementation and policy issues to the scale-up of President’s programme, as well as new challenges arising from the ongoing COVID19 pandemic, a cluster randomised control trial (cRCT- the gold standard evaluation in experimental science) is being conducted to evaluate the impact of President’s programmes to promote youth mental health in public schools of Pakistan (Hamdani et al, 2020).