Preventing violence against children Title: Breaking barriers to scale up: Maximizing retention and engagement of a self-led parenting app

Over one billion children are victims of abuse each year. While the potential for parenting programmes to reduce violence and improve children's outcomes is widely recognised, access to effective parenting support remains scarce. The next step is to develop strategies to scale-up parenting programmes, especially in Africa where rates of abuse are highest. The dramatic growth of mobile technology and Machine Learning offer major potential to increase access, personalise content and provide sustainable solutions to wide-scale dissemination.

Oxford University in collaboration with the World Health Organization, UNICEF and the South African, Kenyan, and Nigerian governments is adapting an evidence-based parenting programme - Parenting for Lifelong Health Teen (PLH-Teen) - for mobile-app version. The app will be
rigorously tested in an online randomised controlled trial (n = 36 000) in South Africa, Kenya, and Nigeria. While the app has the potential to support millions of families, further research is needed to inform effective retention and engagement strategies to ensure that as many families as possible benefit. This is particularly important as attrition and low engagement consumes scarce resources and diminishes impact, reach and sustainability of interventions.

My proposed research capitalises on the forthcoming parenting app to inform effective participation and retention strategies, firstly, by determining the factors associated with variation in engagement and retention, secondly, by exploring whether higher engagement is associated with positive outcomes, and thirdly, by investigating the ways in which engagement influences the underlying pathways associated with change. Understanding these influences on participation and mechanisms of change will provide solutions to improving uptake and participation among violence-affected families. In doing so, the study will provide policy-makers and practitioners with tools to better plan and deliver digital parenting programmes.

While this research seeks to reduce violence against children, the results will also be of interest for those seeking to deliver any other digital social programme. Thus, my proposed study has substantial policy contributions not only in Africa and within a violence prevention context, but also in the field of implementation science and mobile-health technologies.