Treating Anxiety and Social Deficits in Children with Autism Spectrum Disorder in Two Schools in Nairobi, Kenya.
School-based CBT in Nairobi cut both anxiety and autism severity for students aged 5-21.
01Research in Context
What this study did
Researchers ran a school-based CBT program in two Nairobi schools. Kids with autism aged 5 to 21 joined weekly sessions during the school day.
Half the kids got the CBT lessons right away. The other half waited and served as the control group. After the program ended, the team compared anxiety and autism severity scores.
What they found
The CBT group showed clear drops in anxiety and overall autism severity. The wait-list group stayed the same.
The gains were large enough to be clinically meaningful. A simple school program moved the needle on two big problem areas.
How this fits with other research
Perihan et al. (2020) pooled 23 similar studies and found the same moderate anxiety drop. The Nairobi result sits right inside that bigger pattern.
Byiers et al. (2025) built on this idea by letting parents pick the top three problems to tackle. Their newer modular CBT worked faster, showing how the field keeps refining the approach.
Pickard et al. (2019) point out a mismatch: most CBT trials, including this one, still skew toward higher-income families. The Nairobi sample helps widen the evidence base, but more work is needed.
Why it matters
You can run CBT in a regular school with no fancy clinic. Bring the therapy to the child, not the child to the clinic. Start with a simple group format, then borrow from Byiers et al. (2025) and let caregivers set the top targets for even faster gains.
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02At a glance
03Original abstract
Anxiety in children with Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD) contributes to their functional impairment. We evaluated a cognitive-behavioral program for anxiety and social deficits in children with ASD in two schools in Nairobi City, Kenya. Parents and teachers of 40 children and adolescents with ASD (5-21 years) participated, randomized by school. The two schools were randomly assigned to either intervention (n = 20) or control (n = 20). There was a significant improvement in ASD severity as well as anxiety within the treatment group, which was not seen in the control group. These findings support the expansion of treatments for ASD core deficits and secondary problems in youth with ASD in developing countries.
Journal of autism and developmental disorders, 2019 · doi:10.1007/s10803-019-04045-6