Our Work
What this looks like in practice
Our flagship innovation from AnduBer Research.
ComeThru
A mental wellness companion that meets people where they already are — on WhatsApp.
AnduBer ResearchThe problem
Mental health systems in East Africa are clinic-bound, English-first, and gated by stigma. Most people who need support never make a first appointment. Those who do face waitlists measured in months. Telehealth solutions assume a smartphone, an app store, an appointment, and the language of the platform — assumptions that exclude the majority of the population that mental-health frameworks claim to serve.
What we did
We built where people already are. WhatsApp is the de-facto operating system for communication across the continent — it works on entry-level phones, it doesn't require an install, and people are already comfortable inside it. ComeThru is a companion that lives inside that channel, designed in close collaboration with therapists, peer counsellors, and people with lived experience of the conditions it supports.
The product isn't a chatbot trying to replace a therapist. It is a triage layer, a check-in companion, and a structured set of self-guided exercises grounded in protocols clinicians already use. When someone needs a human, ComeThru hands them off — to a peer counsellor for some classes of need, to a referral pathway for clinical cases, to crisis resources when safety is at stake.
Privacy was a first-order design constraint. Conversations are end-to-end encrypted by the channel itself; the companion stores only what is necessary to provide continuity, and discloses that storage in plain language. Language and tone were calibrated by a working group that included Sheng-speakers and rural users — not just a Nairobi product team.
We're rolling ComeThru out in phases against a research protocol. Early indicators we're tracking: completion rates of self-guided modules; time-to-first-handoff for cases that warrant human escalation; user-reported usefulness across age, language and rural/urban segments. Outputs we are explicitly not optimising for: total messages exchanged, daily active users, or any other engagement metric that risks becoming a proxy for product success.
What we learned
- WhatsApp is not a workaround. For most of our users it is the canonical app for communication; designing for it primarily — not as a fallback — surfaced design decisions a smartphone-first product would have missed.
- Peer counsellors are an underused resource. Triage that routes appropriate cases to trained peers (rather than queuing everything for clinicians) shortens time-to-first-help by an order of magnitude.
What’s next
More to come
New work lands here when it’s mature enough to write about honestly.
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info@anduberinnovate.space
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Nairobi, Kenya
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