What was Yaya?

Yaya was a digital life skills app developed by Avert as part of the EAGLE project in Mozambique, a literacy and life skills programme funded by Global Affairs Canada and implemented by VSO and Light for the World. EAGLE stands for Empowering Adolescent Girls to Learn and Earn.

The Yaya app provided low literacy, out-of-school adolescent girls and young women in Mozambique with a set of tablet-based, user-friendly, resources on life skills, sex and relationships, that aimed to increase their knowledge and enable them to make informed sexual health and relationship decisions.

The Yaya app was co-created with continuous engagement of the adolescent girls through ideation, testing, language development and validation of branding, content, and user interface and experience, to ensure the app was relevant, culturally appropriate, and met users’ needs.

Yaya provided a flexible, home-based learning solution, in local languages, using low-cost tablets.

The impact of the co-creation process was very positive. It made the application more acceptable to the community because they had participated in its creation … The girls really, in exploring their ideas, developed self-esteem and were able to believe in themselves. They could express their opinions about sexuality and feel that they were important and involved in what was going on.

Why was Yaya developed?

The EAGLE project worked with out-of-school, low literacy adolescent girls and young women to achieve economic independence.

Low literacy girls and young women are economically disadvantaged and have increased vulnerability to HIV and poor sexual and reproductive health outcomes. By improving their literacy and numeracy capabilities, giving them sexual health knowledge and skills, and supporting economic empowerment the programme aimed to reduce their HIV risk, support sexual health, and increase their opportunity to be active empowered citizens.

Yaya was developed to complement the wider life skills work of the project, adding an opportunity to reinforce learning and topic exploration in the privacy of home, and could be used alone or with friends and family. Yaya was installed on low cost tablets alongside an education app. It was often the first time these young women and girls had had the opportunity to engage with digital content, providing a new and fresh opportunity to support their self-efficacy and agency.

We like what [Yaya] said… We can trust her because she has a friendly voice and seems like a very knowledgeable person.

How did Yaya make a difference?

Yaya was initially rolled out to over 550 girls, with the aim of reaching a total of 3,000 girls across Sofala and Manica provinces by the project's end. Yaya was available in Ndau and Sena, two of the local languages spoken in the project areas.

The development and co-creation process generated considerable learning about how to include low literacy, digitally naïve communities in digital health developments. Avert worked with VSO to ensure the learning from the project also supported wider internal learning about how digital approaches could support lasting change in life skills, even among marginalised groups, and help address issues of longer-term sustainability.

More about Yaya

Conversations for change

Take a listen to these Unicef interview podcasts which highlight Avert’s work on Boost and Yaya - supporting innovative health literacy approaches

Lessons learnt developing Yaya

Reaching low-literacy, out-of-school, adolescent girls in Mozambique with SRHR information has required a considered and innovative approach, shaped by the girls themselves

Photo credit: mauritius images GmbH/Alamy Stock Photo. Photos are used for illustrative purposes. They do not imply health status or behaviour.