AI Mental Health Chatbot for Youth with Disabilities in Kenya

Client‍

Next Step Foundation, U.S.-based nonprofit with offices in Austin, TX and Nairobi, Kenya, supports Youth with Disabilities through in-school counseling programs like Upili.

Challenge‍

Upili showed strong results, reducing student anxiety by 82%, but support ended after school hours. Next Step wanted a chatbot that could provide ongoing, culturally sensitive mental health support, even outside school, in Swahili, with limited internet access.

“AI doesn’t experience empathy the way humans do and that’s where the real challenge begins.” — Jackie, Counselor at Next Step Foundation

Goals

• 24/7 support beyond school settings
• Swahili language for local access
• Empathetic chatbot tuned for mental health contexts
• Compatibility with low-bandwidth environments
  

Solution‍

Next Step partnered with 26bitz, a healthcare-focused software company specializing in secure, AI-powered solutions, to build Tumaini — a mental health chatbot tailored to the needs of Students with Disabilities.

We delivered a working solution in 4 weeks, focused on:

• Custom AI model: We extended the original OpenAI-based setup with a custom Swahili-tuned LLM (UlizaLlama), optimizing for speed, performance, and local relevance.
  
  
• Empathetic design: The chatbot tone was adapted for psychological safety and accessibility.
  
  
• Tech stack: Built a custom Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) pipeline with Qdrant; wrapped into FastAPI and deployed to AWS (EC2 g4dn.xlarge).
  
  
• Integration: Seamlessly connected the chatbot to an existing Bubble web app.
  
  

Infrastructure Challenge‍

Since the client’s AWS account was brand new, we hit a hard limit: no GPU quota. Initial deployment on SageMaker was expensive. Our team took the lead, engaging directly with AWS support over several weeks, advocating strongly for the client’s needs. Thanks to our persistence and expertise, we secured access to lower-cost GPU instances, got a bigger quota and ran the model on EC2. ‍

This let us cut infrastructure costs by 72%, keep performance intact and meet the client’s budget.

Results

• Fully deployed and integrated chatbot in 4 weeks
• AI chatbot for accessible mental health care
• Secure, scalable infrastructure on AWS

Building Tumaini was a joint effort, blending domain expertise from the Next Step Foundation with 26bitz’s hands-on AI and healthcare experience. Here's how our client described working with us throughout the process: 

"NextStep Foundation is excited to collaborate with 26bitz to bring mental health support to Youth with Disabilities in Kenya and beyond. 26bitz immediately understood our vision for bringing accessible mental health support to this vulnerable population. Utilizing a model fine-tuned on Swahili language will expand the number of students who can access Tumaini and make interactions feel more organic and natural. We look forward to continuing to work with 26bitz to expand the features and functions of Tumaini to better serve the mental health needs of Youth with Disabilities." — Chris Harrison, Executive Chairman at Next Step Foundation

What’s Next‍

We're exploring WhatsApp integration to expand access and will continue to scale Tumaini across Kenya and neighboring countries, with plans to grow the knowledge base, add languages, and keep adapting the tool based on real user feedback.