Request for Proposal WAZZII Platform Feature Development and Service Design

About this role

Who We Are

Girl Effect is an international non-profit that builds media and technology girls choose, use and trust. Across Africa and South Asia, our youth brands — including Wazzii and Tuki in Kenya, Big Sis in South Africa, Chhaa Jaa and Bol Behen in India, and Yegna in Ethiopia — reach millions of adolescent girls and young women (AGYW) with content and digital tools that support the decisions shaping their lives, from sexual and reproductive health (SRH) to wellbeing, education and work. Our approach is girl-centred by design: girls co-create our products, our evidence teams measure what actually changes for them, and our safeguarding architecture treats their safety as a design constraint, never an afterthought.

Girl Effect has spent a decade building conversational products for young people, and several years deliberately and publicly charting what responsible technology for girls looks like.

What is WAZZII

Today. WAZZII is Girl Effect’s WhatsApp-based chatbot for AGYW in Kenya, offering confidential SRH information, signposting and human help desk support in English and Sheng. It draws on a decade-deep corpus of more than 50 million questions young people have asked our chatbots — one of the richest datasets in existence on what girls actually want to know. Human help desk operators, working on the RapidPro help desk, remain central to the experience.

The next evolution of its design. Over the coming two years, WAZZII will evolve from a conversational companion into a trusted service-navigation platform: girls will move from a conversation to finding a real, vetted, youth-friendly provider nearby; prepare for the visit with confidence; access services using codes issued in the chat; and be supported to continue afterwards — with verified loops confirming a girl was actually served. Tens of thousands of girls are expected to use these capabilities directly, and the learning will shape Girl Effect’s chatbot portfolio globally. This tender selects the partner for the service design and platform engineering behind that evolution.

The Girl Effect Tech Stack

Girl Effect has built an ecosystem of technologies which underpin its user-facing solutions. By using the existing tech stack, we ensure our in-country teams can focus their time and budget on delivering impact. The stack consists of:

• RapidPro: Low-code chatbot building platform through which we connect to instant messaging platforms, build out user engagement pathways including informational content, quizzes and surveys, and connect to other tools via API. Hosted on partner org’s multi-tenant AWS infrastructure

Wagtail: Python-based CMS, used to build our user-facing websites. Connects to RapidPro via API to provide structured content such as service directories. Self-hosted on AWSIntelligence Module: GE’s self-built tool to manage connectivity with LLMs. Connects via API to RapidPro to build user-facing GenAI workflows.Self-hosted on AzureAPIs: Manage connections between the different tools in the system. Self-hosted on AWS

We are open to suggestions of changes that could be made to the stack which would provide tangible benefits to our programmatic output, whether through improved functionality or cost efficiencies.

Objective

To appoint an experienced technology and service-design partner to design, build, test, deploy and support the next phase of WAZZII as a safe, accessible and measurable service-navigation platform for adolescent girls and young women in Kenya.

The engagement will follow a service-design-led approach, with user needs, safeguarding requirements and tested service journeys informing the final technical build.

What You will do

Girl Effect is seeking an experienced partner to deliver WAZZII’s next evolution through a human-centred design approach: service design leads, and engineering follows. The partner’s senior service designer works with girls, operators and the Girl Effect team to understand needs, shape journeys and define the feature requirements — and the build then delivers against those requirements. The partner will build on WAZZII’s existing stack and be onboarded to current systems and documentation at inception. AI functionality is not in scope of this TOR.

Service design. Key activities include:

• Co-creation workshops with young people — multiple rounds across the engagement, designed and facilitated with Girl Effect — shaping the finder, the redemption moment, visit preparation and continuation support around how girls actually live, move and pay

• Design sprints with the Girl Effect team — per feature cluster, turning co-creation insight and programme requirements into tested, buildable designs before engineering begins

• End-to-end journey mapping — from first conversation to provider visit to continuation, kept current as the build evolves

• Escalation flow design — with Girl Effect’s safeguarding team, so every journey has a safe, human path out

• Service blueprint for the redemption moment — the seconds at the pharmacy counter where the whole service succeeds or fails for a girl

• Feature requirements definition — workflow maps and functional requirement packs per feature cluster — the outputs that define what gets built, for this engagement and for future platform capabilities

• Design QA — on every girl-facing feature, including accessibility and low-bandwidth performance

Feature development. Many of the features likely to be built as part of these requirements include, but are not limited to:

• Code redemption system — girls receive single-use codes in the chat that unlock services at participating pharmacies and clinics. The partner builds the full lifecycle: secure code generation, delivery in-chat, validation at the counter, and reconciliation — with anti-fraud controls (single-use enforcement, expiry, anomaly detection) and reliable performance on low-end devices and patchy connectivity

• Provider dashboard — a simple web dashboard for participating…