Consilient Talk

Effective communication and education between healthcare providers and communities remains one of the leading challenges to providing and ensuring uptake of quality healthcare services across sub-Saharan Africa. There are various underlying contributing factors, some of the most prevalent being households’ distance from healthcare centers, shortage of staff to disseminate communications, and inconsistent spreading of information. Moreover, strategies differ not only between countries but also among communities, often lacking input from communities themselves, leading to ineffective approaches for given contexts. Context-specific and participatory community health communications and outreach is needed to improve uptake and use of health messages.

In Kenya specifically, ineffective health communications has been identified as a major barrier to uptake of services by LVCT Health, the country’s largest PReP distribution and preventive HIV programming organization. To determine the best approach for addressing these challenges, Consilient Talk is working with LVCT Health to leverage digital avatars and AI technology to support community health communications through Community Health Workers (CHWs) in Kenya, a group that is the key bridge between the healthcare system and local communities where they are highly trusted. CHWs are often the sole link between primary healthcare facilities and patients, and can reach remote and underserved areas where formal health services are not often available. Though the program was established in 2006, CHWs were only formally recognized as members of the Kenyan health system through an initiative by Johnson and Johnson in 2023. This recent formalization is a huge step in the right direction, as it provided CHWs with salaries, healthcare, upskilling, and critical resources such as health kits for initial health screenings for things like blood pressure and blood glucose levels. Despite this, CHWs still face significant challenges.

Specific problems:

• Responsibility for a wide and burdensome range of responsibilities: CHWs provide a wide range of services including nutrition and illness screening, contraception, prenatal care, immunizations, and basic treatments. When necessary, they refer patients to health facilities for more specialized care as well as play a critical role in monitoring and reporting disease outbreaks and their communities’ overall health to the relevant stakeholders. Finally, they disseminate crucial information throughout communities on HIV prevention and management, and health education, promotion, and preventative information. 

• Necessity to travel unmanageably far distances: CHWs often serve large areas and in turn spend a significant portion of their time traveling within communities from healthcare facilities to households to obtain and then distribute information. Not only does this back and forth have a damaging effect on their morale, it uses up critical time that they could be using to deliver the health services their patients need.

• Shortage of CHWs: There are nearly 10,000 CHWs (of the over 50 million people that live in Kenya, there are between 35-45 CHWs per village of 5,000), meaning each CHW is responsible for serving nearly 150 people. Considering the challenges above, there are simply not enough CHWs to manage the long list of responsibilities along with commuting from healthcare centers to households.

Consilient Talk has built a front-end user interface with digital avatars with a back-end AI-driven language to address the distance, staff shortage, and inconsistent information dissemination faced by the community health communications field. While this solution is focused on CHWs in Kenya, we will use the lessons learned in this pilot to address similar barriers faced in other contexts. 

For this specific solution, Consilient Talk’s digital avatar platform and AI-driven language will tackle the challenges faced by CHWs in Kenya by:

• Easing the burden of CHW responsibilities: By using Consilient Talk Avatars to support the last portion of CHW responsibilities (disseminating crucial information throughout communities on HIV prevention and management, and health education, promotion, and preventative information), CHWs will have a less burdensome workload and can focus their efforts directly on providing healthcare services to their communities.

• Limiting the need for back and forth travel from healthcare facilities to households: The primary reason for CHWs needing to travel back and forth from healthcare facilities to households is so they can collect the information from the healthcare providers that they need to disseminate to their communities. Consilient Talk will allow healthcare providers to upload the information they would like disseminated out, which CHWs can then use to display to the communities they serve, ultimately limiting the need to travel back and forth.

• Reducing responsibilities and limiting travel will make the current number of CHWs more manageable: A significant factor in the shortage of CHWs is that they have an unmanageable workload and spend too much time traveling. By solving those challenges through the solutions above, the current number of CHWs will be significantly more reasonable.

How Consilient Talk works:

• Flexible Avatar selection: CHWs and healthcare providers can select from a wide range of avatars, with all ethnicities included, that they will want to communicate their healthcare information to their communities.

• Personalization of information: Teams will be able to build out the exact information that they want communicated through an easy-to-use survey tool. Beyond just disseminating information, health providers will be able to add in interactive questions to collect information on the communities they serve, allowing them to continuously adjust the information they are communicating to fit the needs of their specific communities. 

• Localization of tools: Consilient Talk contains a fully built out library of languages and accents so that CHWs can ensure the Avatar and information being disseminated are as local as their community is. 

• Deploy anywhere: Consilient Talk allows for distribution of information by hand, by email, or even by text. This includes supporting resume, offline use for remote, and low connectivity environments, which is critical for the communities that CHWs work in as internet access is not always readily available.

• Information reproducibly: Our digital avatars always use the same friendly tone and stick to the script, ensuring that teams can eliminate biases and improve reproducibility.

• Get answers quickly: Once surveys are complete, CHWs and health providers receive written reports including analysis, verbatims and visualizations generated by our AI platform.

Consilient Talk’s impact is designed to be multifaceted and with the long-term vision of responding to challenges in healthcare communications and system overall. This solution is focused on serving healthcare providers, community health workers, and the communities in which Kenya’s CHWs work.

Impact on healthcare providers: Using Consilient Talk’s feature of personalization of information will allow healthcare facilities and providers to custom tailor the information that is being disseminated. This includes information that is already being communicated, such as guidance on HIV prevention and management, health education, promotion, and preventative information; but it will also allow providers to add on additional information such as targeted and seasonal health campaigns. Further, it will allow them to develop and add interactive questions to collect information on the communities they are serving, allowing them to iterate and design more effective and targeting communications and campaigns. Finally, it will allow them to ensure that information is being disseminated consistently, reducing variance and biases that may exist from CHW to CHW. With over 13,000 healthcare facilities in Kenya, the reach of this impact is massively significant.

Impact on community health workers: The benefits for the nearly 10,000 CHWs are potentially the greatest. Consilient Talk will reduce the amount of responsibilities of their workload, allowing them to place greater focus and time on the other portions of their work. By having healthcare providers personally develop and distribute the information they want communicated virtually to CHWs, it will reduce the need for CHWs to travel back and forth between healthcare facilities and households, allowing them more time to focus on the households and communities they serve. This more manageable workload and reduced travel will ultimately improve morale and motivation, and foster improved work. 

Impact on communities: The combination of healthcare providers being able to disseminate information that is more holistic and consistent, along with the increased time, attention, and motivation they will receive from CHWs has multiple benefits for communities. It will ensure they are receiving higher quality information that is consistent across their community, and it will reach more people overall, meaning that those who are currently underserved and underrepresented by not receiving vital health education will benefit from the same opportunities as those that are.

At an organizational level, Consilient Talk is well-positioned to deliver a solution that is guided by the inputs, ideas, and agendas in several ways.

First, Consilient Talk is founded on the principle of localization. The parent company, Consilient, was founded in 2012 in Hargeisa, Somaliland and has since opened full-time offices in Nairobi, Khartoum, and Addis Ababa. All of our staff live and work full-time in the countries in which we operate and more than 75% of our full-time staff are nationals of the country in which we are operating. Consilient Talk was born out of more than 12 years of evaluating humanitarian and development programming in Sub-Saharan Africa, conducting thousands of surveys, focus group discussions, key informant interviews, and working with dozens of humanitarian and development partners. During this time, we have seen the challenges that our humanitarian and development partners face in supporting implementation staff, collecting timely information to understand the most effective interventions and to support program adaptation, and to ensure that two-way exchange of information is happening at scale and reaching the most vulnerable and hard-to-reach populations.

Second, the Consilient talk platform is designed in response to the specific needs of humanitarian and development partners in Sub-Saharan Africa. For example, the solution proposed here (and the pilot we will be undertaking)  was born out of conversations with LVCTA and working together to understand their obstacles at the programmatic level (increasing awareness of and access to HIV prevention and treatment) and at the implementation level (training, supporting, and financing an effective network of community health workers) and coming together to design a solution that enables them to overcome some of these challenges. In other words, our solution is informed both through direct engagement with the humanitarian and development actors and through the evaluation of hundreds of program evaluations which bring together the voices of thousands of the most vulnerable beneficiaries of those programs.

Dr. Nduku, our lead researcher, brings over 25 years of versatile healthcare experience, including leadership roles in Government, the United Nations, NGOs, and the Private Sector. With a proven track record of transformation as a CEO, Dr. Nduku excels in strategy development, financial resource mobilization, and policy formulation, particularly in HIV prevention. Her extensive research background, with 35 peer-reviewed publications, underscores her analytical prowess and advocacy for women's health rights. Dr. Nduku's expertise in administration, institutional management, and performance delivery enriches our team's capabilities, ensuring technically robust and impactful solutions tailored to the local context.

In addition to Dr. Nduku, our Nairobi research team comprises skilled professionals with diverse backgrounds in public health, social sciences, and data analysis. This multidisciplinary approach allows us to comprehensively assess the complex socio-cultural and structural factors influencing healthcare access and utilization in Kenya. By leveraging local expertise and engaging with stakeholders at every stage of the project, we ensure that our solution is tailored to the specific context and responsive to the evolving needs of the community health workforce.

Consilient Talk has independently funded the development and rollout of our projects, with no external investments. Our work spans across diverse regions including Chile, Peru, Sudan, Kenya, and Jordan, collaborating with esteemed clients such as CMMB, UNICEF, and Oxfam. In Kenya, Consilient Talk facilitated a comprehensive needs assessment and quality of life survey for cancer patients, utilizing avatars trained in both English and Kamba, the local dialect. Similarly, in Jordan, we conducted a survey on gender equality perceptions among refugees in Zaatari camp, employing Arabic-speaking avatars. Additionally, in Indonesia, we facilitated an impact evaluation of teacher training programs by surveying over 1,000 education professionals and officials using Bahasa-speaking avatars. Our innovative approach, leveraging digital avatars and AI reporting tools, ensures efficient data collection and tailored reporting, contributing to informed decision-making and program effectiveness for our partners.

Support from Solve will allow us to overcome the current obstacles we face to scale Consilient Talk. The guidance, resources, and networks that Solve provides is ultimately what will take our team to the next level more than just the funding. The specific challenges we are seeking Solve’s support on:

Networking Opportunities: Access to Solve’s established community of partners would provide us with strategic guidance on the viability and usability of our current product, allowing us to . Further, Solve and its network offer invaluable insight into industry insights so that we grow in an effective and sustainable way.

Market Expansion: While Consilient Talk has experience in several geographies, Solve and its connected network has experience in geographies beyond our current scope, which is crucial as we scale. Additionally, as we explore new markets, Solve’s capacity workshops and coaching would allow us to expand strategically. 

Financial Constraints: Our prototype was developed at minimal cost and we have been able to pilot quickly based on that, but significant financial resources are required to scale, which is ultimately what will allow us to innovate and expand. Greater financial sustainability will allow us to further develop our AI technology, expand to markets beyond those we are piloting in, and explore ideas that are beyond our current scope. We are further motivated by Solve’s rich network, which will allow us to connect with and learn from a wide range of investors, funders, and grant partners.

Consilient Talk is a sophisticated and novel approach to healthcare communications and feedback collection. Using digital avatars to disseminate information and engage respondents to share and collect data, we are capable of delivering a wide variety of information (text, photo, video, and audio) to users in any major language and from an  avatar that is tailored to look, speak, and act in way that is most familiar or engaging to any user. This flexibility to reach a wide range of users, across multiple languages, means that we can disseminate and collect data digitally at a fraction of the cost compared to traditional methods. Likewise, our avatar platform can capture feedback from users in the form of text, closed-option response prompts, and even speech, meaning that users will be able to provide feedback and information that is readily available for summary and analysis.

Supporting this front-end user interface, is our back-end AI-driven language processing, analysis, and reporting software. We are able to seamlessly take information gathered from the avatar platform, translate user responses in a variety of languages, and quickly produce sophisticated summaries of data and inferential analysis to quickly synthesize user data and convert it into a format that supports adaptation.

This digital avatar and AI-driven approach enables CHWs and healthcare providers to tailor healthcare messaging with intention and localization to address the specific needs of diverse communities, while the rapid data analysis and reporting empowers CHWs and healthcare providers to make informed decisions based on real-time insights. This level of advancement represents a novel use of technology in healthcare communications and in underserved areas where AI has yet to fully break into.

The existing efforts that have been put into improving the CHW program, such as introducing salaries and formally recognizing CHWs, are positive steps but they do not improve the flow of information nor do they ease CHW’s burden or increase the number of people receiving healthcare information. Consilient Talk’s focused solution leveraging artificial intelligence to support the dissemination of health communications will achieve all of this and more, fostering significant potential for impact. 

Further, conventional methods of circulating healthcare communications have remained relatively stagnant and as seen in this case require significant time, travel, and personnel to spark that circulation. By solving those challenges through this solution, we will be able to focus on other aspects of the healthcare system that would benefit from improvements.

The innovative integration of digital avatars and AI in Consilient Talk has the potential to catalyze broader positive impacts within the healthcare communication space. Its ability to optimize communication efficiency and effectiveness could inspire similar AI-driven solutions, ultimately transforming the landscape of healthcare and communications delivery. As AI continues to evolve, Consilient Talk exemplifies how this technology can be leveraged to address pressing healthcare challenges and improve health outcomes for communities worldwide.

Activities/Inputs:

• Selection of avatar

• Development and personalization of information/survey tool

• Compilation and integration of a library of localized languages and accents

• Remote distribution capabilities for offline and low internet connections

• Data analysis and report generation through AI platform

Outputs:

• Availability of diverse avatars for CHWs and healthcare providers to select from

• Accessible and customizable survey tool for building personalized information

• Library of languages and accents to ensure localization of information

• Distribution system enabling information dissemination through various channels

• AI-generated reports including analysis, verbatims, and visualizations

Outcomes:

• Improved communication effectiveness: CHWs and healthcare providers can select avatars that resonate with their communities, facilitating more effective reception of healthcare information.

• Enhanced community engagement: Personalized information and interactive questions allow for tailored communication, ensuring communities feel understood and fostering greater community involvement and feedback.

• Increased accessibility: Localization of tools and languages and accents ensures that healthcare information is delivered in languages and accents familiar to the community, promoting inclusivity and understanding.

• Improved reproducibility: Standardized avatars and scripted communication reduces potential biases and ensures consistency in information delivery, enhancing reliability and trustworthiness.

• Faster decision-making: AI-generated reports provide actionable insights quickly, enabling CHWs and healthcare providers to make informed decisions and adjustments to their approach based on community feedback and data analysis.

Impact:

• Empowered communities: Accessible and personalized healthcare information leads to better health outcomes and increased community empowerment.

• Strengthened healthcare systems: Improved communication and data-driven decision-making contribute to more effective and responsive healthcare delivery, ultimately enhancing the overall health system.

Consilient Talk’s multifaceted approach will work towards improving healthcare communication and information dissemination, ultimately empowering communities and strengthening healthcare systems. By investing in the development of a diverse range of avatars representing various ethnicities and providing an easy-to-use survey tool for personalizing information, Consilient Talk will empower CHWs and healthcare providers to tailor their communication strategies to the specific needs of their communities. Further, the integration of a holistic library of languages and accents ensures that healthcare information can be localized to match specific communities’ linguistic and cultural contexts.

The flexible distribution system allowing for information dissemination by hand, email, or text will address the challenges of low connectivity environments, ensuring that critical health information reaches even the most underserved remote communities. By offering a suite of standardized avatars and scripted communication, the platform promotes consistency and reproducibility in communication delivery, which will minimize biases and enhance trustworthiness.

The ultimate outcomes of Consilient Talk's approach include improved communication effectiveness, enhanced community engagement, increased accessibility to healthcare information, improved reproducibility, and faster decision-making. By providing personalized, localized, and standardized healthcare communication tools, Consilient Talk’s impact will be to empower communities, strengthen healthcare systems, and ultimately contribute to better health outcomes for all.

Consilient Talk focus is on the following impact goals:

• Easing the burden of CHW responsibilities: This Solution will aim to reduce the workload of CHWs by automating the dissemination of crucial healthcare information, allowing CHWs to focus more on delivering direct healthcare services to their communities.

• Limiting the need for back-and-forth travel: By providing a platform for healthcare providers to upload information directly, the necessity for CHWs to travel between healthcare facilities and households for information collection will decrease, reducing time and resource inefficiencies.

• Making the current number of CHWs more manageable: The shortage of CHWs will be addressed by streamlining their responsibilities and reducing travel time, making the existing workforce more effective and sustainable.

The following indicators are  used to measure progress against these impact goals: 

• CHW Workload Reduction: Tracks the percentage decrease in time spent on information dissemination tasks by CHWs after implementing Consilient Talk. CHWs' workloads before and after adopting the platform will be compared to quantify the impact on workload reduction.

• Travel Time Reduction: Measures the frequency and duration of travel undertaken by CHWs between healthcare facilities and households. This indicator assesses the reduction in travel time and costs incurred by CHWs after implementing Consilient Talk, using data logs or self-reported metrics.

• CHW Effectiveness and Retention: Monitors the retention rate of CHWs post-implementation of Consilient Talk. CHWs will be surveyed to gauge their satisfaction with workload changes and to assess any improvements in their ability to deliver healthcare services effectively.

• Community Engagement: Analyzes community feedback and participation levels in healthcare initiatives facilitated by Consilient Talk. Metrics such as survey completion rates, community engagement in interactive questions, participation in health campaigns communicated by healthcare providers, and overall satisfaction with information dissemination efforts can be tracked.

• Health Outcomes: Evaluates the impact of Consilient Talk on health outcomes in communities served by CHWs, specifically by measuring changes in health indicators such as HIV prevalence rates, adherence to preventative measures, and overall health knowledge among community members.

• System Efficiency: Assesses the efficiency gains within healthcare systems resulting from the implementation of Consilient Talk by measuring changes in resource utilization, including staff time allocation, travel expenses, and administrative overhead.

By monitoring these indicators, Consilient Talk can measure progress towards its impact goals which will allow us to continuously iterate and optimize the platform to better serve healthcare providers, CHWs, and their communities. 

Consilient Talk developed an engagement platform using digital avatars for disseminating information and for engaging respondents to share and collect data. Supporting this front-end user interface, is our back-end AI-driven language processing, analysis, and reporting software. 

The digital avatars are thoughtfully designed to offer a diverse and personalized selection, catering to various ethnicities, languages, and accents to ensure localized cultural relevance and inclusivity. They are equipped to deliver a wide range of information through the chosen method (text, photo, video, and/or audio), as well as capture feedback from users in the form of text, closed-option response prompts and speech, allowing users to provide feedback and information that is readily available for  summary and analysis. The personalized and localized survey tool builder enables healthcare providers to tailor their messages specifically to their community’s needs, and with versatile distribution methods and offline capabilities, Consilient Talk ensures accessibility in diverse and underserved settings.

The data our avatars collect is what leverages the back-end AI-driven language processing, analysis, and reporting software. We are able to seamlessly extract data from the avatar platform, translate user responses into multiple languages, and rapidly generate comprehensive summaries and inferential analyses, allowing us to promptly synthesize user data into an adaptable format for informed and actionable decision-making.

Overall, the combination of this sophisticated technology will work towards alleviating CHW burdens, improving communication efficiency by healthcare providers, and enhancing the health system.

5 full-time staff

10 months

Consilient’s commitment to ensuring a diverse, equitable, and inclusive workplace permeates our entire organizational structure. At the broadest level, it is important to understand that localization lies at the core of Consilient Talk’s mission. As an organization, we are committed to maintaining full-time offices in the countries in which we work (as opposed to the part-time consultant model that is common in our industry), provide full-time work for our employees (rather than relying on subcontractors on a project-by-project basis), and hiring locally to the extent possible. Likewise, all international staff that we hire live and work full-time in the country. As a result, the majority of our full-time staff are East African nationals, supported by international staff drawn from across the globe, all working in our Hargeisa, Nairobi, Khartoum, and Addis Ababa offices. 

At the office level, our commitment to diversity, equity, and inclusion is reinforced by our commitment to ensuring representation of the communities in which we work. As a company that is centered around supporting humanitarian and development partners working in fragile contexts, ensuring ethnic, clan/tribal affiliation, and gender representation is absolutely critical to our ability to operate in the country. As a result, our national staff teams are recruited from all over the country and reflect a wide range of ethnic/clan/tribal affiliations. Likewise, Consilient is committed to gender equity in its team composition. Given the sensitivities around gender in many developing contexts, engaging with community members requires that our staff composition can accommodate these sensitivities in its work. In practice, this has meant that Consilient has been a majority female staff (both currently and historically) and that this pattern has been historically maintained at every level of the organization from support staff to senior management. 

For the ethical and practical reasons described above, Consilient actively seeks to recruit staff that represent a wide range of gender, ethnic, and clan/tribal affiliations. Job advertisements are translated into local languages and distributed both locally and internationally through job boards, the web, and through word-of-mouth. All applicants to a position are initially screened through a job-specific assessment.  All applicants who meet a specific performance threshold advance to an interview and the assessment scoring is done without reference to any additional information (not even the applicant CV) and the scoring is done by a diverse panel of staff who would be directly working with the applicant. 

Consilient takes great pride in providing capacity-building and opportunities for advancement within our company. In fact, we generally promote from within, rather than hire externally for all but our entry-level positions. In fact, all but one of our senior team started at an entry-level position, including all of our directors.

Our business model is centered on empowering humanitarian and development partners to enhance service delivery in fragile contexts by providing them with quality data sourced safely and ethically. At the core of our approach is the utilization of digital avatars to collect data at scale, leveraging the power of AI for efficient and cost-effective data collection, processing, and reporting. Our key customers include organizations and governments operating in challenging environments, seeking insights for program evaluation, needs assessments, and impact monitoring. Through our platform, we offer a range of services such as surveys, needs assessments, and impact evaluations, delivered via digital avatars trained in multiple languages to ensure inclusivity and accessibility. Our clients value our solution for its efficiency, scalability, and ability to inform data-driven decision-making, ultimately enabling them to maximize their impact and drive positive change in the communities they serve.

Our plan for financial sustainability revolves around leveraging our established reputation and expertise in research to introduce this innovative product as a new service offering to our existing clientele. With a track record of successfully working with development agencies to improve and monitor their system programming, we aim to capitalize on this trust and familiarity to introduce the digital avatar solution. The value proposition lies in the efficiencies gained through data collection at scale and the utilization of AI for processing. By expanding our service portfolio to include this new product line, we will generate revenue through service contracts with governments and development agencies, as well as sustained donations and grants. To date, we have already demonstrated our ability to secure grants and funding for our research initiatives, and we are confident that our proven track record and the compelling value proposition of the digital avatar solution will attract further investment and funding opportunities. Through a combination of service contracts, grants, and donations, we aim to ensure that our revenue streams cover our expected expenses in the long term, paving the way for financial stability and continued growth.