Parenting Response with Offline Technology to End COVID-associated Trauma ("PROTECT")

COVID-associated child abuse has become a chronic crisis through the intense stressors of economic upheaval, school closure, lockdown and mental health distress, alongside the inaccessibility of in-person support services. The objective of this work is to deliver proven-effective evidence-based child abuse prevention resources, to the world's most vulnerable populations during COVID-19, through a uniquely accessible and context-customised digital parenting app. This Proof of Concept project will conduct pre-post testing and qualitative piloting of our beta version "ParentApp" digital programme in South Africa and Tanzania: two countries with surging COVID rates and low vaccination coverage. If successful, the WHO and UNICEF have committed to scaling up the programme with national governments across the Global South. Remote delivery is a cost-effective feasible alternative, and ParentApp is the world's first offline-accessible, low-data parenting app; the only open-source digital parenting programme; and the only digital programme designed for low-resource settings.

This project will test the feasibility and initial effectiveness of ParentApp in Tanzania and South Africa, to make improvements based on findings, and to involve national and global stakeholders to support the translation of research into innovation at scale. We will do this by: gathering feedback from users and implementers on the relevance, acceptability, satisfaction and usability of ParentApp; engaging with international and government strategic partners and implementing NGOs to understand how ParentApp can be implemented, delivered and used in their activities; generating quantitative and qualitative data to test initial effectiveness on target outcomes by evaluating at immediate post-test the effect of the programme on primary and secondary outcomes.

This proposal offers ground-breaking potential for massive societal impact through building a new evidence-base in digital violence prevention.