The Challenge: Beyond School Hours
The Next Step Foundation’s Upili school counseling program demonstrated remarkable success, reducing student anxiety by 82%. However, this crucial support was limited to school hours, leaving a significant gap during evenings, weekends, and holidays.
We faced the challenge of creating a solution that could
- Provide continuous, 24/7 access to mental health support
- Communicate effectively in Swahili for local accessibility
- Maintain an empathetic, psychologically safe tone suitable for mental health contexts
- Function reliably in low-bandwidth environments common in many regions
“AI doesn’t experience empathy the way humans do and that’s where the real challenge begins.”
— Jackie, Counselor at Next Step Foundation
Our Solution: Tumaini AI Chatbot
Results
- Fully deployed and integrated chatbot in 4 weeks
- AI chatbot for accessible mental health care
- Secure, scalable infrastructure on AWS
Building Tumaini was a joint effort, blending domain expertise from the Next Step Foundation with 26bitz’s hands-on AI and healthcare experience.