TL;DR

Colombia just passed Law 2460 , prioritizing mental health, especially for children and adolescents, and requiring schools to actively promote emotional wellbeing (Congreso de la República, 2025). At the same time, the country faces a major shortage of mental health professionals. This creates a unique policy window for scalable, evidence-based school interventions.

GRANA is one of them: a school-based, evidence-informed program that trains teachers to deliver brief, structured sessions focused on reducing anxiety and depression. Early results show strong engagement, high fidelity, and real potential to scale within the public system.

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GRANA started like this:

It began with a question that was hard to ignore:

Why should a child’s wellbeing depend on where they are born?

While some children have access to psychologists, socioemotional programs, and safe spaces, others grow up without the tools to understand what they feel, manage their emotions, or believe they can change their reality.

And it’s not because they don’t want to. It’s because no one has taught them.

That’s where it started. But it also started in a very specific place: an incubation program. We met in Theory of Change Makers, a space that taught us to do something we don’t always do when trying to create change: pause. Pause to ask better questions. Pause to stop assuming. Pause to put data behind what we felt.

We came to the program with intuitions about mental health, education, and inequality. But through the process, we understood that it’s not enough for something to sound good and to have the desire to help. You have to truly understand the problem, and when we did, its scale became impossible to ignore.

The mental health crisis among young people in Latin America is a major structural challenge. Currently, only in Colombia an estimated 7.4 million children and adolescents show signs of mental health difficulties, with anxiety and depression being the most prevalent conditions. The highest rates are found among youth aged 17–24, followed by adolescents aged 12–16 and children aged 6–11 (Procuraduría General de la Nación, 2023). In 2023, youth aged 15–19 had the highest rates of depression in the country and the highest prevalence of anxiety diagnoses (Ministerio de Salud, 2024).

This issue is even more severe in rural areas, where half of schools lack access to psychosocial support.

Hard data that not only confirmed our intuitions, but pushed us to act.

This urgency is now matched by a major policy shift. In June 2025, Colombia passed Law 2460, which guarantees the right to mental health and explicitly prioritizes children, adolescents, and youth. The law requires educational institutions to promote emotional education, mental health, and prevention: making schools a central platform for intervention. It also includes targeted provisions for rural and conflict-affected regions (PDET), aligning directly with the populations most underserved. At the same time, new funding is being mobilized, including a $150 million USD loan to strengthen mental health services.

Together, this creates a rare policy window: the problem is recognized, the system is mandated to act, and resources are beginning to align.

But a window like this raises a critical question: what should we implement at scale? It became imperative to look for interventions that are not only well-intentioned, but grounded in evidence.

That’s where GRANA started to come to shape. Not from scratch, but from evidence.

We found Shamiri, an evidence-based intervention developed in Kenya, a low-intensity model that uses task-shifting to address the shortage of mental health professionals. Instead of relying solely on specialized mental health professionals, it trains non-specialists—such as teachers—to deliver structured, evidence-based sessions.

It focuses on three validated psychological pillars:

Growth mindset, gratitude, and values:

• Growth mindset: to improve emotional regulation and academic persistence.
• Gratitude: to increase positive affect and optimism.
• Values clarification: to strengthen purpose and motivation.

And we made a decision that felt essential to us: Bring that evidence into the Colombian context. Into our realities.

GRANA is not just an intuitive idea—it is grounded in robust evidence. Randomized controlled trials (RCTs) of the original model have shown significant effect sizes in reducing symptoms of depression (d = 0.45) and anxiety (d = 0.44) at seven-month follow-up.

From a philanthropic and public policy perspective, GRANA stands out for its efficiency. Our cost-effectiveness analysis estimates a cost of $312 USD per DALY (disability-adjusted life year) averted in the base case, classifying it as exceptionally cost-effective according to WHO thresholds for Colombia. As the model scales, the cost per student decreases significantly—from $57.39 USD per participant in the pilot phase to $3.59 USD at scale (Year 12)—enabling a realistic transition toward autonomous implementation by local governments.

GRANA was born from that—but also from something deeply human: The belief that wellbeing can be developed. That it is not fixed. That it is not a privilege.That it should not be a matter of luck.

Today, after our prototype phase (December 2025 – February 2026), we validated that teachers without prior clinical training can understand and deliver the methodology with over 70% fidelity. Adolescents showed a strong ability to internalize the concepts and actively engage through reflection and social learning.

And now, after designing, prototyping, and stepping into classrooms, we are left with one clear certainty: Children understand, reflect and take ownership. They just need the space.

GRANA represents a unique opportunity to invest in the country’s human capital through a scalable, cost-effective, and evidence-based solution. We invite actors across the ecosystem to join this effort to ensure that emotional wellbeing stops being a privilege and becomes a right for every adolescent in Colombia and Latin America.

If you’re interested in collaborating, we invite you to explore our work in more depth:

• Research Report: [PUBLIC] Reports - GRANA
• Cost-effectiveness model. 10.2 [PUBLIC] Cost-Effectiveness Model - (GRANA) - [Updated 03/2026]

Or reach out to us directly—we would love to connect:

Manuela Fernández: fernandezarenasmanuela@gmail.com

Daniela Haddad: daniela7913@gmail.com