Making More Health Together 2025

The annual international conference for social entrepreneurship and impact investment (“The Convention for Social Entrepreneurship and Impact Investment”) organized by Boehringer-Ingelheim took place under the motto “Shaping Tomorrow by Seeding Today”. Prof. Dr. Dr. Silvia Hedenigg, Head of the Master's study program in Counseling and Head of the Friendship Bench project in Friedensau, represented the university and the university's new psychosocial counseling services at a Friendship Bench (FB) booth. She was supported by Paul Chilenga, an alumnus of the university, and Steven Eric Nsengiyumva, a student on the Development Studies course. All three are trained Friendship Bench facilitators and offer psychosocial counseling in German and/or English at the Friedensau Adventist University.

Exhibition visitors, social entrepreneurs and employees in the social and health sector from Germany, India, Kenya, Great Britain, the USA, Ghana, Nigeria, Argentina, Spain and other countries visited our booth and informed themselves about the project originating from Zimbabwe and its implementation in African countries or implementation projects in countries of the Global South in general.

Visitors to our booth were moved by the history of FB and the motivation of the psychiatrist and founder, Dixon Chibanda, to establish an easily accessible, community-based facility to meet the immense need for mental health services: After a patient committed suicide because her family could not afford the bus fare to his clinic - where she had been successfully treated for several years - he wanted to create a community-based service that was within walking distance of anyone and available free of charge. We share this vision in Friedensau and it was immediately understandable for many visitors.

Visitors from Germany and countries of the Global North also showed great interest in the implementation of the Friendship Bench offer in Friedensau. For example, our decision to offer FB for students met with a strong resonance from a professor at a well-known American university, who confirmed a similar need for psychosocial services at her university.

We also experienced spontaneous enthusiasm for the idea of involving lay people in a community-based support service. In the face of demographic change our plan to work in an intergenerational way and to recruit “grandmothers and grandfathers” for the project in a next step was also received with great interest. Whether and how FB would be accepted “in our culture” and by “the German mentality” were further questions that we discussed at our booth.

In addition to our task of representing FB at the stand, we had the opportunity to listen to presentations and panel discussions directly in the plenary hall or to join presentations in adjacent rooms according to our interests: the three of us made a great team! We took away many good discussions, contacts and new networks. The most important thing, however, was the energy, the inspiration and the feeling of being part of the idea of planting a seed today that will help shape tomorrow (Silvia Hedenigg).