Local medical solutions company, Medbook has developed an app that aims to improve Sexual Reproductive Health (SRH) among women and girls in Kenya.
Flora, the app, is designed to track and advise several interested parties in the user’s menstrual life. The app allows young women in relationships to be precisely aware of when to engage in intercourse or not depending on use or no use of contraception and for most clueless men, exactly when their partners is having period moods.
Rahab Wanjiru, one of the app’s developers, said that it was designed to keep track of menstrual cycles in teens and young women and also advice accordingly.
“Flora is an app we developed that is not only tailor-made to keep track of menstrual cycles in teens and young women but also to answer all questions around SRH for the user. It is also all-inclusive in the sense that the main user, whether a parent with a teenage daughter or a sassy millennial whether single or in a relationship, can be synched into the app with the child, boyfriend, or husband if married,” noted Wanjiru.
Furthermore, the app also answers questions regarding sexuality and menses by teens, but with technology that enables link to parents to either filter or sieve through the info they expect their teens to get.
“This is the next phase of app evolution,” notes Rahab Wanjiru, “the Atomated Chat Port.”
“The app lets you have free consultation with one of a quartet – a gynecologist, dietician, fertility expert or psychologist,’ says Marion, ‘- depending on your unique need or what help you seek,” said Wanjiru.
Sexual Reproductive Health has always been the biological genie that sometimes pops out of the bottle at unexpected times. Who doesn’t remember that girl in primary school, mortally embarrassed because a period popped suddenly, staining not just cloth but sullying reputation?
Last September, 14-year old Jackie Chep’ngeno committed suicide in Bomet after being humiliated and booted out of class for being a ‘dirty girl’ by her female teacher when her maiden menses took her by surprise.
This period-shaming suicide episode not only attracted protests in Bomet and opprobrium from national female legislators, but drew global attention; with the story making both the UK’s Guardian and the USA’s Huffington Post, as people huffed and puffed about ‘period shaming.
“No matter how much we talk about periods, or the government gives out its free pads, we simply can’t get young people to not get confused, or lose track altogether, of the issue,” said Marion Wambui, one of the developers of the app.
We have ads always playing on TV for teens, millennial women openly buying period paraphernalia in the supermarket without qualms, yet there is a lack of timing that, abuse and moral issues aside, has resulted in hundreds of thousands of teen pregnancy this year alone.
