Director of Community Resources at the City of Toronto & scientist in the CAMH’s Institute for Mental Health Policy Research
Akwatu Khenti is Director of Community Resources at the City of Toronto’s Social Development, Finance and Administration Division. He has since November 2020 been Special Advisor to the City of Toronto’s COVID 19 equity initiative and Chair of the Black Scientists’ Task Force on Vaccine Equity. He is an affiliate scientist with the Institute for Mental Health Policy Research (IMHPR) at the Centre for Addiction and Mental Health (CAMH) and an assistant Professor with the Dalla Lana School of Public Health (DLSPH). He has collaborated with Indigenous communities in Hidalgo, Mexico and Lima, Peru to strengthen mental health in primary health care and adapt Canadian health promotion strategies to their cultural contexts. He has also taught a wide variety of courses, from International Health, Human Rights and Peacebuilding to Global perspectives on the health of women and children.
Akwatu is formerly the Assistant Deputy Minister for Ontario’s Anti-Racism Directorate (2017-2020) as well as CAMH’s Director of Transformative Global Health. (1997-2017). He has a PhD in health policy and equity from York University and was appointed as a member of the Council of Canadian Academies’ (CCA) Expert Panel on Socio-Economic Impacts of Science and Health Misinformation (2021-22).
Dr. Khenti has inspired many local efforts to improve mental health across low income countries – in Latin America and the Caribbean, sub-Saharan Africa as well as south Asia – through intensive substance abuse training and management competencies for mental health. He also developed an anti-stigma intervention in primary health care in Ontario and has co-led drug research capacity building for the past decade years with the Inter-American Drug Abuse Control Commission (CICAD, OAS) involving 30 universities across Latin America and the Caribbean.
Akwatu was a researcher on the development of easy-to-follow, culturally adapted cognitive-behavioral therapy (CBT) interventions for working with individuals of Latin American origin as well as those of African Caribbean origin (both English and French speaking). This CBT intervention has been applied with traditional healers in Haiti to assess whether it can strengthen the system of informal care. Akwatu also led the development of a specialized drug treatment and prevention programs for youth in Toronto, entitled the Substance Abuse Program for African and Caribbean Youth (SAPACCY).
His doctoral research chronicled the relationship of the social determinants of health and systemic racism on racialized gun violence in Toronto’s 140 neighborhoods from 2004-2014.