Global public health has improved vastly during the past 25 years, and especially in the survival of infants and young children. However, many of these children, particularly in Africa, continue to live in poverty and in unhealthy, unsupportive environments, and will not be able to meet their developmental potential. In other words, they will survive but not thrive.  The UN’s Sustainable Development Goals (SDG) stress sustainable development, not just survival and disease reduction, and the Global Strategy for Women’s, Children’s and Adolescents’ Health proposes a Survive (end preventable deaths), Thrive (ensure health and wellbeing) and Transform (expand enabling environments) agenda. For children to thrive they must make good developmental progress from birth until the end of adolescence.
Addressing the social determinants of developmental problems, this volume offers a broad, contextualised understanding of the factors that impact on children and adolescents in Africa. Unlike other works on the subject it is Africa-wide in its scope, with case studies in Ethiopia, Kenya, Malawi, Nigeria, Rwanda and South Africa.

Dr Mark Tomlinson is Associate Professor in the Department of Psychology at the University of Stellenbosch and is the Regional Editor (Africa) for the international journal Global: The Journal of Human Population Health and Development.

Dr Charlotte Hanlon is Associate Professor at Addis Ababa University, Ethiopia, and Clinical Senior Lecturer in Global Mental Health at King’s College, London. She is a member of the Royal College of Psychiatrists and sits on the Editorial Board of the Ethiopian Medical Journal. She has written numerous journal articles on the cultural aspects of measuring mental disorders, women’s mental health, mental health services and systems research, intervention trials, child mental health and development, non-communicable diseases and mental health.

Anne Stevenson is Programme Director for the Neuropsychiatric Genetics of African Populations (NeuroGAP) Psychosis Study at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health and the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard. She has extensive experience managing healthcare and research programmes in Boston, Rwanda and Ghana.