Nafilab

In Sub-Saharan Africa, 64 per cent of the population is below the age of 24 years. The journey of a youth living in this region is associated with tremendous challenges when it comes to accessing sexual and reproductive health and rights services. 

Usually there are few services delivery points for adolescents and young people and when available, in some context, they face financial barriers, distance from facilities, inequitable or restrictive norms, stigma and discrimination from communities, families, and healthcare providers, leading to high rates of adolescent pregnancies and a high proportion of unmet family planning needs, and in some cases, death from unsafe abortion.

Currently, at around 22 per cent, the contraceptive prevalence rate in Sub-Saharan Africa is still low. Efforts need to be done to meet the needs of more than 100 million of women and girls in Sub-Saharan Africa in term of addressing the profound disparity in access to medically verified information and the full range of modern contraceptive products. In this context, young people aged 15-19 years constitute the population group with the highest unmet demand (around 70%). 

Nafilab is a community centred mobile health platform powered by Artificial Intelligence to provide affordable, quality end to end youth friendly SRHR services including on-demand online family planning counselling, tele-consultation through a network of accredited health providers, prescription of modern contraceptives at convenience, discreet home delivery of tests with follow-up results and treatment for Sexually Transmitted Infections through the platform. 

For people living in remote areas, with no access to internet and or with basic cellphone, the platform is also accessible through USSD. 

We are partnering with the Ministry of health (MoH) to provide free access to our platform for adolescents and young people. The partnership will enable users to have access to public practitioners on our platform for free as well as access to public laboratories for affordable at home tests.

Our solution targets adolescents and young people from 15 to 35 years old with unmet needs of SRHR services in Sub-Saharan Africa.

Our core target is women aged 15–19 who want to avoid a pregnancy and don’t have access to SRHR services. 

Nafilab provides an opportunity for women to be at the core of our activities to economically empower them. we partner with women in communities to provide virtual health care. We recruit, train, and equip young girls and women with secondary education to provide high quality family planning counselling services on our platform. 

In addition, through our platform, underserved young people will be able to access SRHR services specially adapted to them without the tremendous barriers the usually face in a traditional health facility. 

According to the Guttmacher Adding Up report: if all women wanting to avoid a pregnancy were to use modern contraceptives at the standards recommended by the World Health Organization, the impacts would be dramatic:

Unintended pregnancies would drop by 68 per cent

Unsafe abortions would drop by 72 per cent

In addition, if all women infected with chlamydia or gonorrhoea were given effective and timely treatment, cases of pelvic inflammatory disease and infertility caused by these STIs would be eliminated.

As a young woman a grew up facing barriers in accessing SRHR information and services. I also noticed how other youths around me were experiencing the same issues as me. This year the was at least four teenage pregnancies in my neighbourhood, this is a sad situation. 

The Nafilab initiative was founded by young people who want to bring positive health outcome to the community. We are young experts in our area and always collaborate with communities’ youths in all our initiative process, from ideation to implementation.

When we started Nafilab one year ago it was only a WhatsApp group where youths can access medically accurate SRHR information, however, gradually youths stated that the needed more than information, they needed equal access to SRHR services especially in our environment where there is an unfamiliarity with local health services.

Côte d’Ivoire like many other Sub-Saharan countries has made significant progress in family planning by growing by 9% the use of modern contraceptives. However, the contraceptive prevalence rate is still low. With Guttmacher estimating that ‘Approximately 218 million women of reproductive age (15–49) in low and middle-income countries (LMICs) have an unmet need for modern contraception—that is, they want to avoid a pregnancy but are not using a modern method. About half (49%) of pregnancies in LMICs—111 million annually—are unintended.’

Our application to solve is the unique opportunity for our team address the financial and technical barriers we are facing, and which slowing our capacity to growth and provide effective services to young people in Côte d’Ivoire and beyond.

This challenge will enable us to provide free services to youth in vulnerable and unstable position who face additional barriers in accessing SRHR services.

Nafilab uses a community centred and rights-based approach as well as High Impact Practices (HIPs) to deliver SRHR services to adolescents and young people. 

• The rights-based approach enables young people to actively take part in decisions regarding their sexual and reproductive health, challenge those who are preventing them and encourage the governments to respect, protect and fulfil every young people SRHR.
• The community-based approach puts young people in our activities. 
• High Impact Practices (HIPs) are a set of evidence-based family planning practices vetted by experts against specific criteria and documented in an easy-to-use format. We use Artificial Intelligence to provide high efficient and personalised services to young people. 

We are on a mission to empower adolescents and young people in Sub-Saharan countries to make autonomous decisions about her own body and equally access to affordable, quality  SRHR services including modern contraception.

Partnership with ministry of health and community members will enable us achieve our impact goals.

We use 5 indicators to measure our progress toward our impact goals.

- The proportion of young men and women aged 15–19 with basic knowledge about SRHR.

- The numbers of partnerships with Sub-Saharan Countries Ministries of Health.

- The proportion of public health workers who provide services on the platform.

- The proportion of young women who renew their contraceptives use on the platform.

- The number of young women who are trained to become online counsellors.

Diversity, equity, and inclusion have always been present in our journey. As we firmly believe in meaningful youth engagement, and continuously promote and create an enabling environment for the work with our collaborators. I also encourage and create space for connection and dialogue in our initiatives.

We generate revenue through charging services fees and partnerships with ministry of health and other stakeholders.

We will become financially sustainable by charging services fee to our users.