A recently released report from Women Deliver, Going Online for Sexual and Reproductive Health (August 2020), spotlights evaluation fieldwork Panoply Digital conducted in Malawi on behalf of the Praekelt Foundation and Girl Effect. This user experience evaluation of a youth sexual and reproductive health and rights (SRHR) information platform was designed to help improve the overall user experience.

Between 2016 and 2017, Panoply Digital was entrusted to undertake a multi-country evaluation of the TuneMe SRHR platform. Designed for teenagers and young adults in Malawi, Zambia, Botswana, Namibia, and, Zimbabwe, TuneMe was meant to help youth make more informed decisions about their bodies and sexual and reproductive health. Desired outcomes included, in particular, empowering girls and young women through (increased) awareness of their sexual and reproductive rights as well as to get support when facing difficult situations related to SRHR. Our evaluation work focused on improving the overall user experience of the platform to help boost uptake of the information shared, large amounts of which was generated by the youth users themselves.

The TuneMe platform accrued thousands of users in Malawi, a country where the prevalence of teenage pregnancy was 29%. Our innovative evaluation process enabled the Praekelt Foundation and Girl Effect teams to make real-time design and user interface changes to the platform as well as the approach for sharing content. These changes increased youth engagement with the platform, as surfaced through focus group discussions held.

Panoply Digital is delighted to be featured in this Women Deliver report, which emphasizes how to meaningfully engage adolescent girls and young women for smarter digital interventions.

You can find the reference to Panoply Digital’s work on page 14 of this linked PDF and can watch a video featuring more information from this report below. If you’re working on any digital products or services for women or girls and want support evaluating or designing the product and/or service, please get in touch with us at theteam@panoplydigital.com.

In this research study, Women Deliver and Girl Effect worked together to understand how adolescent girls and young women in India, Malawi, and Rwanda are using digital platforms to learn about their sexual and reproductive health. The study found that adolescent girls and young women are using digital platforms as a one-stop shop to find information about their bodies, their health, and their relationships. However, they aren’t acting on the information partially due to a lack of trust and fear of social stigma. The study is especially unique because young people were meaningfully engaged throughout the whole process, including: in shaping the research questions, in collecting the data, discussing the results, and generating recommendations.