Burundi

In this context of poverty, there is a huge lack of basic needs, damaged social fabric and neglect of mental health issues. The international non-governmental organisation (NGO) TPO (Trans- cultural Psychosocial Organisation, after 2005: HealthNet TPO) successfully applied in 2000 for funds from The Netherlands government to begin a programme which would provide psychosocial and mental health services to this war related population, while new clinics and hospitals are being built and staffed, these offer only primary health services and mental healthcare is still largely neglected despite the widespread need for it, especially during the post-war. In 2000, Burundi had one psychiatrist (trained abroad) and no psychiatric nurses or psychiatric social workers. The country had (and still has) only one psychiatric hospital, with around 60 beds and with no psychiatrist. The Faculty of Education at the University of Burundi started to train clinical psychologists in the late 1990s, but at the time there were no organisations in which these workers could be employed.
There are very limited human resources with almost no ongoing training or retraining (World Health Organization, 2008). There has been very little mental health research (Sharan et al., 2009), although a regional conference of health ministers noted the importance of moving the development of psychosocial interventions onto “the central stage of evidence based science” (Baingana & Ventevogel, 2008, p. 172).