Therefore, BRAC has taken two important initiatives. The first is the 'Humanitarian Play Lab Model'. While working with Rohingya children in Cox's Bazar, we identified a key issue: children are living traumatized by the violence they have experienced.
We need to focus on their mental health before we focus on their education. That's why we started this initiative as a pilot project, and are now discussing replicating our 'Humanitarian Play Lab model' in refugee camps around the world, as it can be applied to refugee camps globally .
The second initiative is the community-based 'Para-Counselor Model'. With this intervention, we aim to reach people who are at risk of developing mental health disorders and provide them with the opportunity to seek help early.
It has been seen that if we can talk openly to someone about the things that are causing us mental stress then we can nip mental health disorders in the bud. Under this model, BRAC is currently providing services with more than eight hundred para-counselors across the country.
Now, the Bangladesh government plans to use this model to take mental health care to communities. In this regard, a Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) has already been signed between BRAC and the Non-Communicable Disease Control (NCDC) program under the Directorate General of Health Services (DGHS).