Doctoral Student
University of Nairobi
Nairobi, Nairobi Area, Kenya
Tina Wakukha Masai is a mental health specialist and doctoral candidate in Clinical Psychology at the University of Nairobi, Kenya. Her current work focuses on youth mental health, digital innovation in mental health, suicide prevention, and mental health economics. She advances these areas through curriculum development, capacity building, implementation science, and informing evidence-based mental health policy.
An internationally certified addiction professional and master trainer of trainers, Tina has provided technical expertise in harm reduction across sub-Saharan Africa. She has contributed significantly to Kenya’s national mental health and substance use guidelines, including the Implementation Guidelines for Medically Assisted Therapy (MAT) for People Who Use and Inject Drugs, Integration of Mental Health Services for Key and Vulnerable Populations, and the Community-Based Rehabilitation Framework for Substance Use Disorders. She also led the development of Kenya’s MAT Psychosocial Module and co-developed contextualized suicide prevention training packages for religious leaders and non-specialized healthcare workers.
Tina currently serves as Kenya’s co-investigator in a multi-country study on evidence-informed mental health policymaking in Africa and is a member of the Advocacy and Policy Technical Working Group for the African Global Mental Health Institute.
At this conference, she will present findings from her doctoral research, which examines the patient cost of methadone maintenance and its impact on treatment retention in Kenya. Her poster highlights insights into patient costs, willingness to pay for Methadone Maintenance Treatment (MMT) and discusses the broader policy implications for sustainable health financing of MMT in low-resource settings such as Kenya.
Monday, October 6, 2025
7:30am - 8:45am EST