Taking a health programme from one country to four — without losing what made it work.

Tanzania is where Champions started — piloted there before I joined. Ethiopia was the first expansion beyond it, and where I came onto the team as a junior designer. The work was adapting content structure and session flow to a second health system, making the app multilingual, and adding a CMS so programme teams could publish without going through engineering. I did research support, high-fidelity design and build support; product ownership and design leadership on this phase sat with colleagues at the studio.

Kenya was the third country, and the first where I led from the front. The Tanzanian model could not simply be translated across: the audience shifted to young women and the conversations moved onto sexual and reproductive health. Research with facilitators surfaced friction in the session flow and content navigation that had been accepted as normal. We reshaped the information architecture around it, and added a services directory, draft reports that survive a dropped connection, and PIN-lock privacy.

Nigeria presented a distinct challenge. Community health programmes required explicit approval from local gatekeepers — community leaders, school administrators and health officials — before facilitators could begin sessions. That is a sequencing problem, not an interface one. I co-led the workshops in Abuja and co-led the design of a content-sharing flow that let facilitators send session material ahead of a visit. We tested it in Kenya first, then brought it into the shared product rather than building a Nigerian variant.

The framework held. One product served four markets without fragmenting into four: country teams could configure content, language and session structure independently while the core architecture stayed shared. What began as a girls’ network model in Tanzania ended up carrying immunisation, HPV and SRH programmes across Ethiopia, Kenya and Nigeria.