Ask FAY

At 14 years old, one of our team members took a peek at his sister’s diary, which revealed her painful journey of aborting a child through unsafe methods that she found online, fearing the stigma and discrimination in her community. Youth often rely on the internet and social media for information, but unfortunately, most of this information is inaccurate or difficult to understand.

Nigeria is the most populous country in sub-Saharan Africa and according to the UNFPA, it is estimated that 60 percent of Nigeria's population is under the age of 25, making it the youngest country in Africa. A review of existing literature has reported that one of the major problems in addressing sexual and reproductive health is that the use of services remains low, partly due to social and cultural reasons and partly due to limited access to these services. Even when services are available, they may not use them. Youth aren’t getting the real-world information and support they need to make their own sexual health decisions. Even when they do, the products and services they need are difficult to access because of youth-specific barriers, such as the need for privacy from parents, their inability to pay, and confusion around their rights.

There is therefore an urgent need to put engaging, evidence-based sexual health information into the hands of young people. In addition, Nigerian youths account for 20% of new HIV infections, highlighting the pressing need for stigma-free innovative models that improve access to sexual and reproductive health information and services and are tailored to address the unique needs of adolescents and young adults in Nigeria.

Our goal is to provide an accessible bridge to action for young people. This will revolutionize the way that adolescents and young adults access health care. By increasing their agency to make their own sexual health decisions and creating frictionless access to services, youth can get what they need on their own terms.

Through human-centered design, we have partnered with Nigerian youths to research, design, and prototype a digital platform, Ask FAY. Ask FAY is a web platform that has the clinical rigor of a healthcare site with the welcoming feel of a social media site. Ask FAY supports young people to make informed decisions about their sexual health and wellness through tailored digitally-based decision-support tools and a seamless connection to the sexual health products and services they need most. Through our co-design process with young people, healthcare providers, and other experts in the field, we have built interactive decision-support tools to guide young people to understand which SRH products and services might be the right fit based on their needs and preferences.

Ask FAY is also a web platform that delivers immediate and anonymous access to SRH information and services to adolescents and young adults. The platform is an aggregator of:

1. A peer-supported reddit-like community
2. A virtual one-stop shop
3. An integrated provider platform for referral services
4. A robust FAQ section with visual media
5. An AI-embedded decision-support tool 

The reddit-like community is built around anonymity and moderation, and its purpose is to foster safe, open, and healthy conversations around sex. It’ll be kept alive by users of the product; the robust FAQ is populated with the most up-to-date research on sexual health topics ranging from menstrual cycles to PCOS; and the virtual shop aggregates sexual health services from different partners. The in-built moderation bot and community policies will help flag content that is inappropriate or factually incorrect. With embedded machine learning algorithms, Ask FAY provides personalized recommendations based on each person’s needs and preferences. Every aspect of the digital platform is co-designed with youths to ensure that the platform meets their support needs. This solution aims to:

1. Improve knowledge: Access SRH information in a private, safe space. 
2. Improve access: Linkage to products and services through the service provider platform.
3. Improve quality: Provision of individualized information and services with machine learning

As an aggregator of services, Ask FAY caters for inclusiveness, a youth-centric approach, and strives to maintain anonymity while ensuring that every young person has equitable access to sexual health information and services at all times.

Our target population is made up of young, sexually curious, and active youths between the ages of 18 and 35. Secondary research revealed that Nigerian youths face significant barriers in accessing critical information and services. More specifically, females, younger adults, and LGBTQI+ youth experience disparities in access and health outcomes, and fear stigma and discrimination from providers

However, to understand the root cause of SRH problems among these groups without making assumptions, we employed empathy research as part of the human-centered design process. We conducted intercepts and in-depths interviews for 15 diverse young people and 3 expert stakeholders to further understand young people’s needs, wants, barriers and frustration on Sexual and Reproductive health.

Our findings were categorized into five (5) insight statements

• Youths want more practical and less theoretical knowledge on sexual and reproductive health
• The definition of sex has expanded, but sexual education has not expanded accordingly. Sexual health information should include dimensions of sex beyond just biology to cover topics such as pleasure, consent, healthy relationships, and sexual orientation
• Youths want real-time anonymous access to sexual health information and services
• Due to social and religious restrictions, youths are forced to navigate stigma and discrimination situations alone
• Youths want to hear from the perspective of an older friend or sister, but with the knowledge of a healthcare provider

Take a moment to think about the insights above. Put yourself in their shoes. What if you could access all your questions about sex, sexual health, identity and relationships all in one place, what place or channel would that be?

The current youth generation has a range of genders and sexualities, which leaves them with needs that are unmet by traditional sexual education that tries to squeeze them into outdated molds. 

With Ask FAY, we are giving young girls and women the option to take into consideration the challenges of real life, not just what is most advantageous from a clinical perspective. One of the youth we interviewed said and we quote, “People who are medical professionals will just say what's in the book. People with actual experience can tell you more real answers”.

With Ask FAY, we are providing comprehensive SRH solutions to young people faced with many challenges. Our reddit-like community provides the opportunity for young people to ask any question(s) they have on SRH and the answers are crowdsourced by their peers with complete anonymity. Our sub-community, designed specifically for young girls and women, will be a one-stop solution for all information and questions on female health and well-being.

We are spelling out SRH information and services in a way that is actionable, answers their questions, refers them to external services, and allows them to learn more if they want to.

Our team comprises human-centered design experts, sexual and reproductive health researchers, product designers, data analysts, and implementation scientists.

Our team is proficient in developing scalable health service delivery models, training tools, and healthcare innovations in partnership with youth and public and private healthcare providers. We have experience working with young people, parents, teachers, communities, and providers to support youth in making healthy reproductive and economic choices. Our design ethos is ‘no design for youth, without youth.’

From our vast experiences, program design starts with co-design workshops and participatory research with young people and the people in their ecosystem. We seek to map user needs, identify potential user segments, and identify barriers and opportunities within the communities where they live. Potential solutions are prototyped and iterated with youth and communities, informed by lean qualitative and quantitative data, and advanced with a package of tools and materials to support the fidelity of implementation at scale. We have experience designing both demand- and supply-side SRH innovations and communications across multiple countries, with designs carefully adapted to specific contexts and user segments.

Our team also specializes in developing service models that better meet young people’s needs in low and high-tech contexts, including direct-to-consumer approaches. Our team is adept in designing, building and scaling technologies and communication to reach both literate and non-literate youth and those with and without access to tech. We have already built BINTA!; a web platform that is currently serving more than 500 youths in getting access to HIV Pre-exposure Prophylaxis and other preventive options in Lagos, Nigeria. The platform was developed with a combination of human-centered design, participatory research techniques, and rigorous data collection methods. This has facilitated the easy adoption and sustainability of this intervention. Our team also employed a crowdsourcing open call and a modified Delphi technique to co-author a practical guide to improve youth consent processes for HIV research in low- and middle-income countries.

So far, for our solution (Ask FAY), we have conducted user research and expert interviews with key stakeholders to hear specific needs and perspectives when it comes to information, products and services. We have also built a working high-fidelity prototype and tested it in a live setting with real users.

Our solution has gone far beyond a concept. We have employed all five stages of human-centered design to build our minimum viable product. Our current prototype has been tested in a live setting with real users. This has already attracted customers who have validated the product idea. We also currently have a waitlist of 350 youths aged 18-35 years with 65% being female ready to use Ask FAY when we launch.

To reach young people in our focus communities, we have developed content in English, Pidgin, and three other local languages. We have developed and tested the branding of our product, finalized the user interface and visual design aspects, and conducted quality assurance and usability testing to optimize young people’s experience with the product. Finally, we have iterated on the prototype based on the feedback we received from users and we now have a final product ready to be launched.

Watch a demo of a user interacting with the prototype during the testing phase:  https://youtu.be/yRo_BMsYuLY 

Ask FAY is a web platform that has the clinical rigor of a healthcare site and the welcoming feel of a social media site. We strongly believe that with digital technology, we can offer a potential way to reach youth at scale with accurate, private, trusted information and streamline their access to products and services, such as contraceptives, STI/HIV testing, and prevention services.

Our solution is very innovative because it is an aggregator. You get all the most helpful and supportive information and services in one place. It also combines the three things Nigerian youths wants the most - immediacy, expertise and anonymity.

With embedded machine learning algorithms, Ask FAY provides personalized recommendations based on each person’s needs and preferences. This serves as a form of a decision-support tool because young people know themselves and their bodies best, and want the ability to make informed decisions. They want to know all their options and be gently guided toward an answer without judgment or shame. 

Our innovative solution is revolutionizing the delivery of sexual and reproductive health information and services to reach young people at scale.

In the next 12-months, we plan to be the most popular healthcare site among young people in Nigeria with over 25,000 users. We also aim to double the number of youth practicing safe sex.

In the next 5 years, we aim for 1 million Nigerian youths to take up sexual and reproductive health information and services through our platform and we envision a reduction in the cases of STIs and HIV by more than 50%.

We plan to achieve these goals with intensive influencer marketing to nudge users on the social media apps on which they currently are. This, together with product-led marketing, will drive user growth after launch. We are also in talks about a potential partnership with Flo, the number one period and ovulation tracker worldwide, with over 300 million people around the globe.

Our approach to design is informed by the latest global evidence on adolescent health and livelihoods. We combine human-centered design, participatory research techniques, and rigorous data collection methods to develop solutions with young people and their communities.

From our empathy research, we have understood the root cause of the problem and we have targeted our solution to specifically address the foundation of SRH problems among young adults. The problems roughly break down into these three patterns:

1. Young people don’t have the information that they need
2. Young people don’t have supportive, knowledgeable adults in their lives that can help them reach a decision about sexual health
3. Young people can’t access sexual health services or products that can’t be purchased over the counter with cash because they can’t figure out how to navigate the system

Our solution has been carefully created to ensure that young people not only have enough information and guidance that gives them autonomy over their sexual health but also presents the information in a digestible way from their fellow peers.

Ask FAY will also be very impactful because our platform creates a safe space for youth that feels like a community without the dangers of unmoderated discussions. We are meeting youths where they are in terms of what they know, what they want to learn and how they want to learn it without judgment.

1. Executive leadership: 4
2. Contractors: 2
3. Youth advisory board: 3

18 months

Firstly, all members of our team have undergone training on safeguarding and cultural competencies. These trainings have helped the team understand and respect cultural, social, and economic variations within our organization and the youths we are designing with. We have an anonymous system for reporting any unethical behaviors or misconduct among the team members. This is to make everyone feel valued, supported, and safe.

We conduct frequent check-ins with local partners to ensure that the ideas that are developed for testing are appropriate for the community and align with the implementing partners’ expertise, policies, and strategic goals. We also conduct a joint risk analysis before testing any prototypes with the community and develop a risk mitigation plan. We may modify prototypes to mitigate any risks that are foreseen by the local partners.

We also seek International Review Board (IRB) approval for all of our projects pertaining to youth, especially minors, and have successfully led multiple research proposals through the IRB process at the Nigerian Institute of Medical Research (NIMR).

In addition, all team members undergo background checks and have accredited research ethics training on protecting human research participants. On all projects, we obtain written informed consent from all participants. We also provide verbal and written information about the study and explain that participation is voluntary and confidential and that not participating will have no consequences.

Ask FAY runs on a usage-based pricing model. Users access the features of the product using FayCredits. Upon signing up, users get 100 free FayCredits which run out at a rate proportional to their usage. This affords every user a free trial period on all the available services that’s unique to their usage. Users can also earn more credits for referring other users to the platform. We’ll charge as low as $1 for 100 FayCredits, thus making it easy for people to access the services on the site in a flexible and convenient manner.

With this model, Ask FAY increases access to safe sexual health information, deepens access to sexual health services, and fosters openness and connection with other people on the basis of sexual and reproductive health. This strongly impacts SDG 3.7, which is focused on sexual and reproductive health.

The sexual health and wellness market is worth $57B today, and is projected to reach $110 billion in 2030. Considering the lack of access that Africans face today, the market can expand to be worth a lot more if this problem is solved. We estimate that this is a $500B opportunity.

From a bottom-up perspective, there are no direct competitors or market fundamentals preventing Ask FAY from gaining dominant market share in the country.   

We intend to generate revenue in two simple ways:

1. Through the sale of Faycredits to users
2. Through partnerships with third-party organizations and service providers

For the first revenue stream, users can purchase any of the plans we have for Faycredits. The basic plan costs $1 for 100 Faycredits, the standard plan costs $5 for 500 Faycredits, and the premium plan costs $10 per month for unlimited monthly access to the product.

The second revenue model is a monthly charge of $100 + 5% of sales for service providers listing their services on Ask FAY's platform and virtual shop.

We plan to get this off the ground with the grant from this challenge (if selected), which will allow us to build a v1 of our product and launch a beta test program, after which we’ll go live with the product.

Part of the grant from this challenge (if selected) will also be spent on influencer marketing to nudge users on the social media apps on which they currently are. This, together with product-led marketing, will drive user growth after launch. Based on the growth metrics in this phase, we’ll raise seed funding to double down on growth. The thesis is that once network effects kick in, the subscription revenue will be more than enough to sustain the project, with a decent margin.