VALUE BASED COUNSELING® EXPERT (Master Trainer and Translator)

Ipso gGmbH ([https://ipsocontext.org/](https://ipsocontext.org/)) is a Germany-based humanitarian not-for-profit organization specialized in Mental Health and Psychosocial Support Services (MHPSS) and in sociocultural empowerment at the community level to promote peace and social cohesion. At the individual level, Psychosocial Counselors trained by Ipso provide culturally sensitive Value Based Counseling® (VBC). The service is currently available in more than 20 languages in face-to-face sessions as well as online.

Ipso was a driving force for the integration of VBC® into the Basic Package of Health Services, Essential Package of Hospital Services and National Mental Health Strategy of the Afghan public health system between 2011 and 2016. With donor funding from the EU and the German Foreign Office, Ipso trained more than 500 men and women as Psychosocial Counselors, of whom 380 were employed at Comprehensive Health Centers countrywide, and developed a train-the-trainers system for sustainability. Doctors and nurses were trained to team up with counselors for referrals of patients whose symptoms were related to social stress.

Keeping the original counseling quality standards turned out to be the biggest challenge after Ipso handed training over to the Ministry of Public Health. Since 2016, a Mental Health and Psychosocial Center in Kabul provides services to Afghans who suffer from a high mental health burden and high level of stress in their daily lives and provides immediate trauma care after exposure to potentially traumatizing events. The Center offers individual face-to-face and online psychosocial counseling to adolescent and adult beneficiaries across the country regardless of gender, ethnicity and economic situation, runs a day care center and offers outpatient psychiatric assessment and treatment. Psychosocial counselors provide online counseling to clients across the country for those who cannot visit the center in person.

The center in Kabul is run by the Afghan NGO IPSO, supported by Ipso gGmbH. To ensure Afghan ownership, Ipso gGmbH does not base international consultants or staff in Afghanistan but has been building the capacity of the Afghan NGO to run the center during short trips and online. A key element of success has been the use of highly qualified consultants with extensive country experience able to train Afghan women and men in our Value Based Counseling® approach as psychosocial counselors, trainers and master trainers, to supervise the same, to continuously develop the counseling approach and training methods further..