Tackling Africa's depression epidemic

With thoughts from Jennifer Bass

StrongMinds is creating a scalable chat platform that will aid in its mission to tackle Africa’s depression epidemic.

Impact Sector

Health

Service Type

Chatbot and Helpdesk

Customer

StrongMinds

Location

Uganda, Zambia

Impact in numbers

A social enterprise founded in 2013 to provide life-changing mental health services to impoverished African women, StrongMinds will use its new WhatsApp platform in both Zambia and Uganda.

Through a Turn.io-powered chat function, StrongMinds’ teams will be able to direct women to nearby health services and screenings provided by especially trained community health workers - as well as answer questions about this pervasive and debilitating mental illness in a private and personal space.

StrongMinds is the only organisation scaling a cost-effective solution to the depression epidemic in Africa.

By training lay community workers to deliver mental health services through group therapy sessions, StrongMinds is able to provide depression treatment to the most underserved populations in sub-Saharan Africa.

"At the Accelerator, it was really great to see people be open about their challenges and to brainstorm together"

Jennifer Bass, StrongMinds

“During COVID-19, WHO, Facebook, and Amazon WBS teamed up with Turn.io to launch a Q&A chatbot against misinformation. Reminders helped us to bulk message custom demographics within a 14.1M pool of users.”

Divya Akanksha

A global solution with the potential to reach billions

SameSame is being created to meet young people who are coming online to explore their sexual orientation and gender identity. In this way, it is an additional layer to the Stepped Care model of mental healthcare, working at the bottom of the pyramid to help young people take care of themselves, raise their awareness of mental health as an issue, reduce stigma, and make it ok to ask questions before passing them onto other services. As members of marginalised minorities, LGBTQ+ youth are far more likely to experience mental health issues that affect their future wellbeing and livelihoods. With that in mind, SameSame has worked with Cognitive Behaviour Therapy (CBT) experts to create activities that help users fight depression, anxiety, and stress and overcome homo- and transphobia.

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Collaboration is an important aspect of spreading the word about the chatbot. SameSame works with organisations in Zimbabwe and South Africa that serve the LGBTQ+ community, many of whom have trained peer mobilisers or enhanced peer mobilisers who are trained to identify someone in mental distress or at risk of experiencing a mental health challenge. These mobilisers and community workers can help make individuals aware of SameSame and get them onto the chatbot. This is one part of a user acquisition strategy that is currently being developed for launch early in 2023 that also includes a social media strategy (Instagram ads, Google ad words, influencer campaigns).

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In this way, SameSame can potentially reach billions of young people.

“Right now, chat is the best channel for us to reach young people because it is a low data platform, it is on every phone, it is encrypted and young people already use and love it. Right now, it helps us materialise our commitment to provide safe, affirming mental health support to LGBTQ+ youth living in places where it's especially tough to be different.”

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Andrew Pattison, Meta

CARE Nigeria Chatbot

The CARE Nigeria chatbot focuses on:

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Providing accurate and reliable information about vaccines, particularly related to early childhood immunization
Enabling users to find a free vaccination center near them
Providing information about CARE Nigeria’s work
Offering users to opt-in to receive targeted reminders about children’s vaccinations

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