The Sinovuyo Teen Parenting Programme is part of the ‘Parenting for Lifelong Health’ initiative, whose objective is to develop and test evidence-informed parenting programmes that are non-commercial and relevant to lower and middle income countries.   Sinovuyo Teen is a 14-week parenting programme for at-risk families with 10–18-year-old adolescents. People living in communities local to the families from a variety of backgrounds were trained to deliver the programme by Clowns without Borders, South Africa. Content was additionally provided via home visits for those families who missed group workshop sessions.

Sinovuyo Teen was incubated and simultaneously tested in the Eastern Cape, South Africa over a four-year period: 

• In 2012 an initial draft programme was discussed with 50 international experts who shared advice and programme input.
• In 2013, the community workers from Keiskamma Trust were trained and tasked to deliver the programme to 30 parent-teen dyads in Hamburg for a pre-post pilot (n=60 participants).
• In 2014, a pre-post test of the revised 2013 programme was conducted in and around King Williams Town.  Isibindi child and youth care workers were trained to deliver the programme to selected Isibindi beneficiaries and to a few  families recommended by social services, schools, chieftains and some through door-to-door recruitment (n = 230 participants/ 115 dyads). The pre-post test recorded self-reported change as a result of programme participation, whilst the qualitative study looked at the experience of child and youth care workers as programme facilitators.
• In 2015–2016, a pragmatic cluster randomised controlled trial was conducted in 40 townships and traditional semi-rural villages surrounding King Williams Town. Deployed government social workers and recruited community members were trained to deliver the programme to 552 parent-teen dyads (270 intervention and 282 control; i.e. n = 1104). The pragmatic cluster randomised controlled trial looked at the extent to which the intended intervention outcomes were achieved. A qualitative study complemented the trial by  looking at the effects of service delivery, policy and socio-economic factors that affected programme effectiveness.

Each year, different groups of caregivers and adolescents were recruited to participate in the programme and research study simultaneously. During the 2015 testing of the programme, a set of research respondents were also recruited into a control group. These respondents did not participate in the Sinovuyo programme, but in an alternative programme on hand-washing.  

The attached toolkit is derived from the 2014 and 2015–2016 studies described above. It contains the research protocols, ethics approval documents and research instruments that were used to test the programme and the policy and service delivery implications.  These are freely available as exemplar tools and processes  for anybody interested in undertaking similar research.