All around the world, sexual health is an awkward but crucial topic for young girls to learn about. In some places these topics may not be covered at school and social norms mean the likelihood of them being discussed with family or friends is low. Stigmas are ingrained and misinformation is rife.
As young people increasingly moved to using messaging apps, in 2018 Girl Effect began testing and building a chatbot as an innovative means to reach girls. Using Artificial Intelligence, Girl Effect created a “digital big sister” to give girls a safe, private, non-judgemental and accurate source for information on topics that they don’t feel comfortable discussing elsewhere.
Hundreds of hours have gone into the creation of Big Sis and her persona, with more than 148,000 conversations and more than 2.8 million messages sent by girls to our two bots, in South Africa and India. Big Sis can recognise questions with over 87% accuracy.
