How TAHMEF Uses Kommunicate to Scale Digital Mental Health Support

I’m Juliana from TAHMEF.

We are a large nonprofit based in Tanzania, and we are building and offering digital healthcare services here. Our focus is on improving fair access to health services through our main product, AHADI, which means “promise” in Swahili.

Through AHADI, we connect young people with local therapists and mental health tools.

We started by doing research to find platforms that offered the services we needed. That is how we found Kommunicate. We reached out to your team and then identified a solution that fit both our budget and the services we wanted to use.

We had worked with other platforms before, but we chose Kommunicate because it fit our budget and helped us achieve the success we were looking for.

We use Kommunicate for our helpline services. We have a chat helpline where users can ask instant questions about mental health through the chatbot.

This is really helpful for us because we have a limited number of mental health professionals, both within our organization and even across the country. Being able to add content that can answer people’s questions is a big advantage.

It allows us to scale our small team. That is where we really see the value of Kommunicate.

We currently have Kommunicate on our mobile app, and we are now working on expanding it to our website. We recently launched a WhatsApp app and are also exploring ways to integrate it with SMS services.

Earlier, we had built a mobile platform and developed a program during the COVID outbreak. We also had a clinical awareness program, but at that time, the platform was mainly used to send messages.

If one of us was available, we could respond. But at one point, we had a plan with around 20,000 people, and when the traffic became too much, we decided to stop the service until we could find a stronger solution to help us manage the workload.

After that, we started looking into Kommunicate.

We have checked how many cases were resolved, and now we are trying to understand how to integrate more impact measurement into the process. For example, surveys that measure progress before and after interventions could be a powerful way to track impact.

The number of cases solved does not fully reflect the quality or impact of the support being provided.

We are also aware of the importance of text messaging, which is why we want to expand to offline text support. Some people are still skeptical about going online and talking about mental health. They are often concerned about security and privacy.

However, once they begin to see results, there is a shift in how they respond.

We are trying to build the experience in a way that helps people engage with support, even if they know AI is involved. What matters is that they still feel a sense of human emotion and care in the interaction.

There is stigma not only around mental health itself, but also around using new technology. Plain text is familiar to people. If we can deliver support through simple text messages, people may feel safer because they understand how it works.

This is something our team is actively thinking about. It helps us find solutions even for challenges we do not fully understand yet.

When it comes to your website and your team, I have checked it out, and your team made sure to give us the support we needed.

Having help through live chat is awesome.