Hunu

Ghana's children with learning and behavioural challenges face obstacles in accessing specialised care and education due to high costs and the limited availability of experts. Studies confirm that children with disabilities in Ghana are ten times less likely to attend school, particularly in marginalised communities. 

Parents often carry a heavy emotional burden when they are unable to provide the best possible support for their children due to circumstances beyond their control. Teachers are sometimes forced to turn children away or provide inadequate support due to a lack of resources or training. Therapists face challenges when integrating their therapy programs within the home or educational setting. There is an urgent need for a more integrated, accessible, and effective approach to support children with behavioural and learning challenges.

Through Hunu, parents can find accessible and cost-effective tools to support their children and match them with available therapy providers. These therapy providers can access evidence-based tools to develop personalised interventions for children and effectively engage parents and teachers in the therapy delivery process. Teachers gain invaluable support and resources, enabling them to foster a more inclusive and adaptive learning environment.

Hunu is a special needs education platform that facilitates collaboration between behaviour therapy providers, parents and teachers to improve the learning outcomes of children with learning and behaviour challenges like autism (ASD) and attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD). 

The platform combines evidence-based approaches with technology and in-person interventions to help children develop their foundational skills (language, communication, social interaction, and academic skills). 

How does it work?

Step 1: Hunu's assessment feature helps therapy providers, parents, and teachers identify a learner's behaviour and learning challenges. Dr Marilyn Marbell-Wilson designed this validated tool specifically for Ghanaians. The feature is available on WhatsApp for parents and teachers. Our chatbot also matches parents and teachers with therapy partners for technical support.

Step 2: Hunu analyses the assessment data against our behaviour intervention library, which has a curriculum for behaviour therapists, parents and teachers. Hunu recommends personalised intervention plans in our online web application. Our clinical operations team helps therapy providers ensure the plans are well designed. 

Step 3: Providers use Hunu to schedule centre-based therapy sessions for children. Providers assign lessons to parents and teachers to deliver at home and in school to help reduce the cost of therapy and ensure children are getting the right support. Parents and teachers receive lessons through WhatsApp.

Step 4: Hunu tracks children's progress by collecting performance data after each session. Each lesson comes with a set of targets a child needs to achieve or master. The platform uses ABA-based performance criteria to track the progress towards each target. 

Facilitating collaboration

Collaboration between providers, parents, and teachers is an important aspect of Hunu's approach. Through messaging technology, parents, teachers, and providers can communicate with each other about a child's progress. This includes sharing information on observed behaviours and achievements across all three learning environments. These engagements help create a strong support system for the child and help build the confidence and capacity of each stakeholder in the child's life.

Clinical operations support

Our clinical operations specialists and providers review session data once a month to use it to improve lesson delivery at the therapy centre, home or school. During these sessions, a focus is on building providers' capacity to engage parents and teachers better and deliver effective lessons at home and school.

Hunu currently focuses on improving the learning outcomes for 350,000 Ghanaian children diagnosed with or demonstrating signs of ASD, ADHD, or intellectual disability (beneficiaries). In the next twenty-four (24) months, we plan to validate our model in Ghana and explore the potential for scaling in other African countries. 

Who does Hunu serve?

Hunu serves behaviour therapy providers (providers) who can ensure remote therapy services provide neurodivergent children with the support they would otherwise miss out on. Providers represent a consistent source of hope for neurodivergent children in Ghana and Africa. With many Ministries of Education in Africa lacking the capacity and expertise, providers help assess and identify our beneficiaries, design behaviour therapy programs, and deliver them at their centres or directly at home or school. 

Providers struggle to include parents and teachers in their therapy approach due to the difficulty and cost of engaging certified behaviour therapists and experts face-to-face in inclusive education in remote settings. For example, therapy centres in Ghana have challenges securing the services of certified behaviour therapists who can help them make sense of assessment data and use the information to create an intervention plan and help them continuously make these plans relevant to the changing needs of children. 

Collaboration is at the core of Hunu. First, each therapy program's lessons recommend strategies for helping providers collaborate with parents and teachers. These strategies include creating the right environment to facilitate learning, everyday tools and activities parents and teachers can use in their lessons, and simple ways for children to practise, express themselves and engage with other children and their siblings (in the case of parents).

Collaborating with our secondary users

Hunu’s collaboration feature enables providers to assign lessons to parents and teachers. Currently, on WhatsApp, parents and teachers access simple instructions from providers. This way, providers keep parents and teachers involved in the therapy delivery. This feature allows our users to share information about children’s progress across multiple environments, which helps further personalise lessons for the child.

Our collaborative approach at Hunu gives parents the companionship they need to help them navigate information and access supportive communities to help their children have a good quality of life. They are not left alone. For teachers, they work with experts in behaviour therapy and special education. Over time, teachers build the capacity to support children in school and experience learning gains for their children overall.

Rudolph Ampofo and Efua Gambrah-Sampaney, our co-founders, are relatives of neurodivergent children. Rudolph partnered with his mother to convert an afterschool program into a behaviour therapy centre in Kumasi, Ghana, which has supported more than 300 families over eight years since 2016. Starting as a teacher and organising teacher training programs for several schools in Ghana, he understands the training decisions of teachers and schools around special needs education in Ghana.

Vida Konadu Agyeman is one of our clinical operations specialists. She taught children in rural and marginalised communities in Ghana under the Lead for Ghana program. Since then, Vida has dedicated herself to exploring ways to build teachers' capacity and create inclusive learning environments. A mother herself, she has helped us develop a human touch for supporting parents through their challenges. Vida is pursuing further studies to expand her knowledge and skills in behaviour therapy and understand how she can better support providers, parents, and teachers.

To complement our knowledge and experience, we work with clinical neurologists, behaviour therapists, and special needs education experts to help our communities build a tech-enabled solution that makes a difference.   

We are a very human-centred organisation. In our product design approach, each team member shadows therapists within our partner providers at least once a month to experience therapy delivery. These shadowing exercises are week-long events, including school and home visits and observing therapy delivery at the therapy centre. This allows our team (including our developers) to understand the impact of our work. Beyond building a deep understanding of our users and their needs, these exercises help build a stronger alignment and empathy for our users and beneficiaries.

Our team focuses on engaging with the communities we serve through regular, structured conversations with parents, teachers, and therapy providers. As part of our clinical support processes, we have monthly town hall conversations with parents, teachers and providers. These conversations guide provide a platform that meets the needs of our community, ensuring our platform is responsive and relevant. 

Because we love hearing from our community, we also conduct period satisfaction surveys that contribute to our design process and help us consider ways to improve the experiences of parents, teachers, and providers. This co-design process ensures that Hunu meets the community's needs and reflects its aspirations and values.

As a team, we know we are far from perfect. We fill our knowledge gaps by prioritising and building partnerships with the right experts, researchers, and stakeholders. Our team's dedication to continuous learning, openness to partnerships, personal experiences, professional dedication, and unique approach make us the right team to deliver our solution.

Hunu was conceptualised in 2020 when schools and therapy centres were closed because of the COVID-19 pandemic. The first trial of Hunu was a Jira service desk form that enabled parents to send requests for support to therapists who signed up to work with us to provide remote therapy consultations to parents. 

Learning from our mistakes and wins, we combined airtables forms with WhatsApp to make it easier for parents to reach our team in 2021. This approach evolved into building a WhatsApp chatbot that helped parents complete the Modified Checklist for Autism in Toddlers (MCHAT-R) assessment within minutes, access free resources and get matched with a certified behaviour therapist. This approach enabled us to support parents in helping their children acquire the essential behaviour and academic skills needed. Between 2021 and 2022, we organised 1,500 training sessions remotely, and parents delivered more than 2,000 therapy sessions at home. However, we struggled to build strong relationships with individual parents because we were a fully remote solution. We would need a large workforce to manage the hundreds of thousands of parents who need help. This also presented scale challenges if we go into new countries. Our approach needed to be more scalable and sustainable.

In 2023, we changed our approach from directly supporting parents to providing support systems to therapy providers to deliver tech-enabled evidence-based therapy services. Today, we work with three therapy centres in Ghana (Wings for Life, Mission Pediatrics and Healthy Kids Foundation). These partners collectively serve 50 children with cognitive disabilities, and more than 80% of these children are in school. 

They use our platform, based on the building block strategy, to deliver evidence-based therapy programs at their centres. Providers use our parent-mediated interventions and special education curriculum to assign simple tasks (examples of lessons are appropriate sitting, identification or matching of 2D and 3D objects, and following instructions) to parents and teachers. Using our messaging features, Hunu collects data from parents and teachers to help providers improve intervention programs for children. We plan to finalise this pilot stage by December 2024 and leverage our partnerships with UNICEF and the African Union to expand across Ghana.

Solve supports social innovations to address some of the world’s most pressing challenges in learning. Through MIT and its community of experts and partners, Solve supports innovators in scaling their impact in improving learning outcomes.

Over the years, we have made several shifts in our business model to ensure we build a solution that considers Africa's economic situation. This means establishing a business model for sustainability and scale. Solve's ecosystem offers opportunities to connect with experts to fine-tune our business model, integrating our impact model with our financial model.

As we work towards the growth stage, the Solve community offers invaluable special education and technology guidance. Solve's researcher network will support us in incorporating evidence and principles of cost-effectiveness into our product development processes to build a scalable platform that can meet our beneficiaries' needs.

Validating our approach in Ghana and scaling across Africa involves navigating complex regulatory structures. By being in the community, we can gain insights from other Solvers on the continent, focusing on learning and collaborating with them to overcome our barriers and make our solution available across multiple African countries. 

With our obsession with impacting the lives of neurodivergent Ghanaian children, we believe the Solve community can help us establish a robust framework for impact evaluation, use data to refine our approach and amplify the stories of African families that Hunu impacts.

Our experience since 2021 brings valuable insights to special education, and we want to share them with everyone. Through Hunu, Solve can catalyse transformational change in the lives of millions of African neurodivergent children.

Solve's support is the right environment for Hunu to grow and work with providers, parents and teachers to improve the learning outcomes of neurodivergent African children.

In Ghana and most African countries, neurodivergent children are often excluded from quality education because of inadequate expertise and support. Hunu combines evidence-based practices with appropriate technology and in-person support to create a hybrid model that fills the therapy gap for neurodivergent children.   

Evidence-based lessons and teaching strategies

Hunu has over 200 lessons to support therapy providers in delivering evidence-based therapy programs in therapy centres. Designed based on researched clinical operations practices, Hunu guides providers through a structured workflow that includes effective case management, incorporating behaviour assessment data into intervention plan design, and using progress data to facilitate data-informed decision-making.  

Adopted a collaborative model to improve learning outcomes

WhatsApp is one of Ghana and Africa's most commonly used messaging platforms. Hunu leverages this messaging technology to help providers engage parents and teachers. Through our collaboration feature, providers share lessons, collect information on a child's behaviour, share progress updates, and provide on-demand support to parents and teachers. Parents, teachers, and providers constantly share information to improve children's learning outcomes. 

Free and open educational resources for parents and teachers.

In partnership with our partner therapy providers, we develop free and open resources that parents and teachers can access on our WhatsApp chatbot as they look for solutions to support their children.

Hunu will help improve learning outcomes for Ghanaian children with ASD, ADHD and intellectual disabilities by facilitating collaboration between therapy providers (providers), parents and teachers. 

Using evidence-based assessment tools, develop data-driven intervention plans, and facilitate therapy delivery using best practice and collaboration.

With our focus in Ghana, Hunu uses a validated tool developed by a Neurological Pediatrician, Dr Marilyn Marbell-Wilson, to identify behaviour and learning challenges related to Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD), ADHD, and intellectual disabilities. 

Our clinical operations team uses assessment data to create behaviour intervention plans with relevant lessons to help children increase their ability to acquire, retain and apply skills and knowledge, for example, using words to communicate, identifying objects, engaging and interacting with others, and reading, writing and counting. Providers deliver lessons using these intervention plans and track performance in therapy lessons using Hunu. 

Hunu also makes it easy for providers to share these lessons with parents and teachers through WhatsApp. It uses nudges to help parents and teachers provide feedback, share observations and concerns, and ask questions. Hunu collects and analyses lesson data from the therapy centre, home, and school. 

Structured engagements with therapy specialists to help identify effective teaching and engagement strategies.

Our clinical team reviews the data weekly and has regular, structured coaching sessions with providers on strategies to improve lesson delivery and engagement with parents and teachers. These sessions include training sessions on parent and teacher engagement and therapy delivery. 

Given the value parents and teachers bring to therapy delivery, our coaching sessions help providers better engage parents and teachers in therapy delivery. Providers share relevant educational resources with parents and teachers to help them deliver quality lessons and collect and share relevant data. 

Hunu makes it easy for our clinical team to access relevant data and work with providers to continuously assess, improve teaching strategies and strengthen engagement with parents and teachers.

Short and medium-term outcomes — a holistic support system that helps improve learning outcomes.

Providers deliver high-quality, evidence-based therapy lessons and actively include parents and teachers in therapy delivery. Over time, through the strengthened collaboration between providers, parents and teachers, children get the prescribed number of therapy hours needed to help them acquire and retain knowledge and skills such as understanding and following instructions and self-expression, matching and identifying objects, reading, writing and counting. 

Because children are engaged in different environments (school, home and centres), they learn to generalise and apply acquired skills, especially in school. The collaborative approach significantly improves learning outcomes and reduces the cost of therapy for parents. 

Our overall impact of improved learning outcomes in Ghanaian children with ASD, ADHD and intellectual disabilities.

By integrating technology with evidence-based approaches and in-person support, Hunu improves the learning outcomes of neurodivergent children with holistic support systems in place. The platform fosters inclusion and the use of data to inform decision-making.

Our impact goals cross the SDG 4 targets and indicators, focusing on improving learning outcomes for children with ASD, ADHD, and intellectual disabilities. 

Our impact goals

Increasing learning outcomes for children with ASD, ADHD and intellectual disability: By designing and delivering evidence-based behaviour intervention plans, our goal is to provide interventions that focus on knowledge and skills like social interaction, object identification, comprehension, and following instructions, children will attain the skills they need to learn and develop in school.

Include children with ASD, ADHD and intellectual disability in education and society: Through our collaborative model, we want to help teachers acquire the skills and support they need to teach and create inclusive learning environments for children with ASD, ADHD and intellectual disability. Thus, more children will have equal opportunities to go to school.  

Make behaviour therapy and special education accessible and affordable for parents: By involving parents and teachers in the therapy delivery process, we aim to tap into their potential to increase the number of hours of intervention children receive, ultimately reducing parents' costs.

Creating a viable hybrid therapy model that can cost-effectively support children in remote areas: Through continuous engagement with the Ministry of Education and their special education unit, we aim to extend the reach of our therapy provider partners to support parents and teachers in remote settings and help improve children's learning outcomes. We want to create a systemic change in Ghana’s education system and expand this impact across Africa.

Measuring our impact

Hunu has adopted the data-driven approach of Applied Behaviour Analysis (ABA) to measure progress. Each intervention plan's lessons outline a series of targeted skills and performance criteria children must achieve.

Skill acquisition, retention, and application: We track the number of times children meet specific performance criteria over a given number of sessions. We also track the application of acquired skills across multiple environments and people to determine whether skills are being applied and need additional support. 

Participation in mainstream education: Measuring the number of children enrolled in mainstream education and achieving academic gains. This includes tracking children's progress through their academic journey and monitoring transition rates across multiple class levels. This helps create a profile for the child that can easily be shared with schools when the child transitions from one school to another.

Engagement with parents and teachers: Tracking the number of sessions delivered by parents and teachers. This includes the number and quality of conversations facilitated through WhatsApp. We also look at the total number of parents and teachers involved in the therapy delivery process.

Increase therapy hours and cost: We track the number of hours children spend engaged in personalised lessons focused on helping them acquire, retain, and apply skills and knowledge. We compare this against therapy costs outside of Hunu to determine savings and return on time investments by parents and teachers.

Hunu uses an open-source development framework that provides a suite of administrative tools and resources that streamline the creation of a mobile-friendly, data-driven application. We also benefit from diverse contributions from a community of developers, making it easier for us to improve the features of Hunu. Adopting this approach enables us to provide therapy providers with an online case, intervention plan, and session management platform. The platform stores text and video-based content that providers can easily access during therapy sessions. 

The platform's built-in data analytics tool provides time-series reports on session performance based on performance metrics set for lessons within intervention plans. This performance is linked to the targets under each lesson, allowing Hunu to track progress at the learner, target, and challenging behaviour levels. 

We currently use WhatsApp to make our validated assessment tools available to parents and teachers. Our WhatsApp chatbot also delivers lessons and open resources to parents and teachers to help them better support children. We use nudges to prompt them to share feedback on lessons and observations on children to help Hunu continuously build the learner's behaviour profile and improve their intervention plans.

Hunu currently does not utilise any AI or machine learning models in Hunu. We plan to test the use of AI to provide recommendations for intervention plans based on the assessment data. Another use case for us is to use AI to review all WhatsApp conversations and engagements on a plan and quickly provide recommendations to providers on how to increase engagement with parents and teachers, simplify lessons, and personalise the content to the needs of parents and teachers.

Three (3) full-time employees, three (3) part-time staff, three contractors and two (2) volunteering EdTech advisors. 

We have been working on Hunu for 3 and a half years now.

Diversity, equity and inclusion is near and dear to Hunu. Recognising the power of inclusion, every team member contributes to the strategic direction of our work by leading at least one goal aligned with our mission and direction. 

Although each team member (including our contractors) lives on the continent, we prioritise engagement with providers, parents, and teachers to further contextualise our delivery to Ghanaian (and African) families' needs. These engagements include town hall conversations and periodic school and partner visits. Parents, providers, and teachers contribute to our product roadmap during our monthly town hall conversations. 

We prioritise the use of open-source technologies. These technologies help keep our costs low, enabling us to provide our platform at a reasonable price and allow families to overcome financial burdens. Families have the opportunity to get their children the care they need without worrying about the barriers of cost.

Hunu offers services to therapy providers aimed at improving learning outcomes for Ghanaian children with ASD, ADHD and intellectual disabilities. Unlike other services like Elemy or Skills for Autism, Hunu is designed for Ghanaian families with the potential to scale across Africa and adopts a collaborative model for therapy delivery. We actively support providers to build a support system for children. 

We offer a free behaviour therapy companion on WhatsApp for parents of children with ASD and related disorders. The service helps identify learning needs, provides personalised resources, and matches parents with our therapy centre partners for early intervention.

Through monthly subscription plans, providers can access case management, validated behaviour assessments, evidence-based data-driven behaviour intervention plans and structured frameworks for delivering and tracking performance. Providers can purchase additional features to engage with parents and caregivers through WhatsApp, share observations, and receive guidance on supporting children in their environment using parent-mediated intervention.

To help providers gain the expertise they need to deliver therapy, we offer paid behaviour therapy training and certification services to providers and individuals who want to increase their knowledge and capacity in behaviour therapy. Our sponsorship model for corporations and NGOs enables us to expand our reach to providers, reducing their costs for using Hunu. 

Hunu streamlines the therapy delivery process. We build strong collaborations between providers, parents and teachers, creating holistic support systems for children. This approach enables us to help improve learning outcomes for children with ASD, ADHD and intellectual disabilities while reducing the financial burden on parents.

We expect to keep improving Hunu by reinvesting our revenue from subscription fees, revenue from training and certification and sponsorship deals with corporates and NGOs. We have three (3) Ghanaian behaviour therapy centres (Wings for Life, Mission Pediatrics and Healthy Kids Foundation) currently paying for a Hunu subscription. They collectively support about 50 children in Ghana. Depending on their needs, they pay for our training and certification programs delivered through our partner, the International Board of Credentialing and Continuing Education Standards (IBCCES). We are currently in conversations with two (3) prospective partners: two (2) therapy centres and one (1) school. We are particularly excited about working with the school because we get to help them set up their own special education needs (SEN) unit, which includes training and certification of teachers and pairing them with one of our therapy partners for intervention plan development and management.

We plan to secure grants and patient investments to help us realise our dream of making our chatbot continuously free for parents and teachers searching for companions through their behavioural journey. 

We are currently prioritising grants and subscription revenue over the next 12 months. Through our partnership with UNICEF, we plan to work with UNICEF to include Hunu in national inclusive education initiatives funded by the Ministry of Education and its donor partners.