About

ACE began with a question that wouldn’t let go: what actually goes wrong in the mind? How does someone move from being okay to being unwell — and what happens in the brain when they do? Is it reversible, and if so, when? What does recovery really look like, and how do we help someone get there?

Those questions came from time spent inside Uganda’s mental health system, watching people arrive at crisis point without ever understanding what was happening to them, or to the people they loved. Sometimes the missing piece wasn’t treatment — it was recognition. A warning sign that no one had been taught to see. A behaviour dismissed as “just how they are” when it was actually a reason asking to be understood. A family blaming itself, or blaming the person, because no one had ever explained that what they were witnessing was an illness, not a punishment.

That gap — between what is actually happening and what people understand about it — is what ACE exists to close. Not by replacing treatment or diagnosis, but by making sure fewer people and families reach crisis point without ever having had the chance to recognise what was coming.

Change starts before the crisis. Before a crisis, there is often a story. Before a behaviour, there is often a reason. ACE was built to help people find both, earlier.

Why We Exist

The need ACE responds to is not anecdotal. It is documented, large, and growing.

• National reviews estimate that close to a third of Ugandans live with some form of mental disorder, with population-based studies putting the prevalence of any mental disorder at roughly 23% in children and 24% in adults, and depression and anxiety among the most common conditions.
• Uganda’s Auditor General has reported that mental, neurological and substance-use cases recorded in the national health information system rose sharply in recent years, with case numbers climbing by more than a quarter in a single recent year.
• The overwhelming majority of people living with a mental illness in Uganda — by most estimates, more than nine in ten — never receive any professional treatment or support.
• National mental health funding remains heavily concentrated at a single referral hospital, leaving primary care facilities, schools and communities with little to no dedicated mental health capacity.
• Stigma, distance to services, and a shortage of trained personnel outside major hospitals compound the treatment gap, particularly for young people, rural communities and low-income households.

These figures describe a system where care is available in principle but inaccessible in practice for most Ugandans. ACE’s model is built specifically to address that access gap — not by replacing clinical psychiatry, but by building the community-level layer of awareness, early identification and first-line support that should exist beneath it.

Our Values

Our Story

ACE began with a simple belief: awareness can change the way people understand mental health, respond to challenges and support one another.

ACE was founded by a clinical psychiatric officer and a small group of colleagues who kept encountering the same story from opposite ends of the health system: by the time a person reached help, months or years of preventable suffering had usually already passed. A student who stopped attending class. A father who quietly stopped sleeping, eating and speaking to his family. An employee whose performance collapsed long before anyone asked why.

Nowhere was that gap more personal than around epilepsy. Neighbours who assumed a seizure meant contagion or a curse. Children quietly pulled out of school. Marriages called off over a diagnosis that had nothing to do with a person’s character. For ACE’s founder, breaking that specific stigma became not just a programme area but the reason the organisation exists at all — and it remains the focus closest to her heart today.

The pattern was never a lack of care for one another — it was a lack of language, tools and access. Few schools have a trained counsellor. Few workplaces have any mental health policy at all. Few communities have anywhere to send someone who is struggling that isn’t a referral hospital hours away. ACE was created to close that distance: to put basic mental health literacy, screening and support within reach of ordinary people, long before a crisis forces the issue.

What began as informal outreach sessions in schools and community halls has grown into a structured programme model — one built on clinical evidence, delivered by trained volunteers and professionals, and designed from day one to be handed to partners who want to bring it to their own institutions and communities.

Leadership & Governance

ACE is governed by a committed leadership team that sets strategic direction and holds the organisation accountable, with day-to-day leadership aligned to ACE’s strategic pillars.

Our Approach

ACE is an education and community-support organisation, not a clinical or emergency service. We do not provide psychiatric diagnosis, prescribing or emergency treatment — our role is awareness, first-line support and connecting people to the appropriate professional care that already exists.

Be Part of the Change

Awareness is where change begins. Join us in creating communities that are more informed, compassionate and willing to act.