eShangazi is one-year-old!
eShangazi has turned one year today! A year with a lot of lessons and struggles to make eShangazi strong and impact more lives of Swahili speaking community.
eShangazi is an online chatbot for providing Sexual and Reproductive Health education and indicating SRH delivering points all over Tanzania.
This Swahili speaking chatbot is basically providing education in three areas; Effects of Teen Pregnancy (Madhara ya Mimba za Utotoni), Family Planning (Uzazi wa Mpango) and SRH Rights (Haki za Uzazi na Ujinsia).
The platform is helping majority of youth whose most questions are paused on how to avoid getting unplanned pregnancies.
eShangazi is more than just an online aunt. Through its Facebook page, the community can share their different perspectives on topics related to sexual and reproductive health hence broaden their knowledge on SRH.
In the late July, 2018, we conducted an online survey to assess whether eShangazi has started to impact lives of the community. The results were amazing. 48 percent of respondents admitted that their lives have been changed positively since they met eShangazi.
This feedback helps the team behind eShangazi to improve the content and services provided by the product so that more lives can be touched.
Also the survey shows that eShangazi services are satisfactory as 67 percent of the users we managed to get hold are satisfied with the services provided by eShangazi.
The chatbot which serves at least 100 users per day was a product of startup competition organized by Sahara Sparks and UNFPA which aimed at creating innovative ideas to reduce number of teen pregnancy in Tanzania.
At first eShangazi was only providing information on SRH, but we added other interesting features so that the bot can be more interactive and funny to use.
The game feature was first added, where the user can play a questions and answers game hence broaden his SRH understanding.
In our journey, we also made ‘expert’ (Wataalamu) feature where users can contact SRH expert through a direct call for further assistance.
Funny thing is, most of our users don’t know yet that eShangazi is just a software robot and not a person. This makes them ask eShangazi other information which are not in the bot hence miscommunication.
Our plan is to make eShangazi known to many people especially youth, and decrease number of teen and unplanned pregnancy in Tanzania.
Happy Birthday eShangazi!
