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Aunty Mimi · family planning · August 2026

Contraception,
answered at the hour
the question arrives.

A free, anonymous AI counsellor for sexual and reproductive health, live since June 2026. Not a hotline and not a campaign: the thing a young person opens at two in the morning, before anyone has told them anything true about the pill.

128Verified clinics
13Countries
56Languages
24/7Always open

Live figures, auntymimi.org, 18 August 2026

The Aunty Mimi chat, open
01 · The gap

The commodity is in the country.
The answer is not.

Of the 12.1 million adolescent women aged 15 to 19 in sub-Saharan Africa who need contraception, 62 per cent are not using a modern method. That is 7.5 million young people whose barrier is almost never the absence of a commodity on a shelf.

It is what happens before the shelf: what they have been told, who they think will find out, and what they expect the person behind the desk to say to them.

Guttmacher Institute, Adding It Up: Meeting the Contraceptive Needs of Adolescents in Sub-Saharan Africa

62%

of adolescents who need contraception
are not using a modern method

02 · Why it persists

Four barriers, none of them
solved by more stock.

The evidence on adolescent contraceptive access in sub-Saharan Africa keeps returning the same four. Each one is upstream of the clinic door, and each one is answerable by something a young person already has in their hand.

Belief

“It will make me barren.”

Fear of side effects and of permanent infertility is the individual-level barrier that recurs across the literature, and it travels faster than any correction.

Privacy

Being seen counts as being caught.

Stigma around sex before marriage turns a clinic queue into a public declaration. Confidentiality is not a nicety here, it is the whole decision.

The desk

A shorter list than she is entitled to.

Providers commonly recommend abstinence first, offer a limited selection of methods, and emphasise the risks of the ones they do offer.

Cost & distance

Free, if you can get there.

The method is free at a public facility. The transport, the lost day and the uncertainty about whether they will be served are not.

Barriers to accessing contraceptive services for adolescents in Sub-Saharan Africa: a scoping review, Global Health Action, 2026 · provider-attitude findings corroborated in provider-perspective studies from South Africa, Rwanda and Ethiopia

A conversation in progress
03 · What she is

No name. No login.
No record to be found by.

A young person can reach her on the web, on WhatsApp, on Telegram or on Messenger, in 56 languages, without an account and without leaving a trace anyone in their house can read. That is the privacy barrier answered in the product rather than in a promise.

Web, any phone browser WhatsApp Telegram Messenger 56 languages Free Anonymous
04 · What it sounds like

She starts something
and nobody has to know.

The whole method range, in the order that matters to the person asking, with the two questions they were actually worried about answered before they had to ask them twice.

Then a real place, with a phone number written into the message, because a link is where the conversation stops for someone on a borrowed phone.

auntymimi.org · anonymous
05 · The counselling policy

Her rules are written down,
and they are testable.

The quality of an AI counsellor is a policy question, not a personality one. These four rules sit at the top of hers, above everything else she knows.

1

Answer the question they asked, in your first sentence. Not a preamble, not a promise to help.

2

Do it, do not offer to do it. “Would you like me to…” costs another message and another bundle.

3

If it needs a phone number, the number is in this message. Never a website as the answer.

4

The only clinics you may name are the ones the tool returned this turn. Never one you remember.

Measured, not asserted

The policy was rewritten on 18 August 2026 and tested by replaying ten conversations in which the previous version had failed: greeting people who were mid-crisis, re-introducing herself, offering instead of answering, and in two cases inventing a clinic and a phone number.

Defects across the ten: 10 before, 0 after. The test runs against the live model with the real tools attached, and it fails automatically on any phone number she was not handed.

Regression suite, auntymimi.org, 18 August 2026

06 · Method choice

The whole range, every time,
with no favourite.

The single most common thing a young person loses at the desk is the list. Aunty Mimi's clinical brief names the full modern method range in her first reply, in plain words, and she is instructed not to steer.

The pillDaily, reversible, and the one most myths attach to
The injectionEvery few months, nothing to keep at home
The implantYears at a time, removable on request
The IUDLong acting, and rarely offered to young people
CondomsThe only method that also prevents HIV and other infections
The emergency pillBest inside 72 hours, and it does not end a pregnancy
What each does to periodsNamed upfront, because that is what stops people
What it costsFree at public facilities, said plainly

What the literature finds at the desk

  • Abstinence recommended first
  • A limited selection of methods offered
  • The risks of those methods emphasised
  • Age and marital status used as a filter

What she is required to do

  • Name the full range, unprompted, in plain words
  • Answer the side-effect question before it is asked twice
  • No judgement about age, marriage or how many partners
  • Then a verified place, with the number in the message
Myth and fact cards
07 · Misinformation

The myth is the method's
real competitor.

“Does the pill make you barren?” is not a fringe question. It is one of the three most repeated things a young person hears about contraception, and it is repeated by people they trust.

She answers it the way it needs answering: the fear named first, then what actually happens to fertility, then what to expect in the first three months so that the real side effect does not arrive as a confirmation of the myth.

08 · The correction

Not a lecture.
A straight answer.

No shame, no “that is a myth”, no paragraph of preamble. The fear is answered, then what to expect is named, then the door is opened.

Fear named first Then the fact Then what to expect Then a place to go
WhatsApp · anonymous
09 · From answer to door

Every answer ends
somewhere you can walk into.

Information that stops at information is a leaflet. When a method is the right answer, she calls a tool that returns a human-verified facility from our own database and writes its name, street and phone number into the message as text, with the tappable card on top rather than instead.

128VerifiedChecked by a person, not scraped
85With a phoneA number that can be dialled today
13CountriesZambia through to Ghana
0InventedShe may not name one from memory

Live figures, auntymimi.org, 18 August 2026

The verified clinic map
Verbatim, 18 August 2026 · asked for PrEP in Mutendere

“I do not have a verified clinic in Mutendere yet. The closest I can confirm in Lusaka is Marie Stopes Lusaka, on Cairo Road. Their number is +260 211 254 988.

You can also call the GBV and support line on 933 and they will direct you to the nearest place that offers PrEP.”

Real output from the live service, unedited

10 · The trust test

What she says when
we do not have it.

A referral service is only worth the weakest thing it says. The failure mode that destroys trust is not silence, it is a confident wrong address, and it is the failure mode language models are most prone to.

So the gap is stated out loud, the nearest confirmed place is offered as being somewhere else, and a national number carries the rest. This behaviour is enforced by test, not by hope.

11 · Continuation

Uptake is the easy half.
Month four is the hard one.

Most of what looks like unmet need is discontinuation: a method started, an unexplained bleed in the second month, nobody to ask at nine at night, and a decision made alone.

She is built for exactly that hour. The tracker sets a pill reminder that reads like nothing at all on a shared phone, predicts the next period from the person's own history, and stores none of it against a name.

Pill reminder that gives nothing away Next period predicted What to expect, month by month Nothing stored against a name
The period and pill tracker, with its calendar
Youth ratings of a facility
12 · Quality of care

Rated by the people
who actually went.

Every verified facility can be rated, anonymously, by the young person who walked in. Not a satisfaction survey run once a year by a consultant: a rating left the same day, by someone with nothing to gain from being polite.

Those ratings roll into provider scorecards. A clinic that turns adolescents away stops being a rumour among young people and becomes a number a programme manager has to answer for.

13 · Commodity security

The stock-out is known
in the queue first.

The people standing in front of the empty shelf know before the report does. Community-led monitoring turns that into data: short surveys any young person can fill in on a phone, logging what was missing, at which facility, on which day.

It is the same channel in both directions. She points a young person at a clinic, and the young person tells us what they found there.

Community-led monitoring
The accessibility controls
14 · Who gets left out

Information you cannot read
is not information.

Fifty-six languages, including five Zambian languages that no machine translates and were translated by hand, string by string. Read aloud, four text sizes, high contrast, a dyslexia-friendly face, and a lite mode that drops the images, because the young person on the tightest budget is the one for whom a heavy page is a locked door.

Read aloud Easy-read rewrite High contrast Lite mode
15 · Safeguards

What she will not do.

A counselling service for adolescents fails on its edge cases, not on its ordinary ones. These four are enforced in the policy and checked by the regression suite.

Disclosure

Violence routes to a person.

A disclosure of coercion or assault drops everything else, states plainly that it is not their fault, gives the number to call now, and asks one question: are you safe.

Restraint

Hurt after sex is not assumed to be violence.

Soreness or bleeding after consensual sex is treated as the health question it usually is. She asks once, and the answer decides which way she goes.

Scope

She is not a doctor and says so.

Never a diagnosis. She gives the best information she has, then names the person who can examine them.

Data

Nothing kept that identifies anyone.

No account, no name, no profile. There is no record for a parent, a partner or an authority to ask for.

16 · Who is behind it

Nothing for young people,
without young people.

Aunty Mimi is a product of The Youth Platform Three Sixty, Zambia's largest adolescent and youth network: 15,000 individual members and more than 200 affiliated institutions, with coordination offices in all ten provinces.

The network holds seats where adolescent health is decided, including the Global Fund Country Coordinating Mechanism, the National AIDS Council Board and the national adolescent health and family planning technical working groups. The engineering is by Pinch Africa.

15,000Young members
200+Member organisations
10Provinces
2016Operating since
The Youth Platform network
A generated report, with its charts
17 · What comes out

Every claim in this deck
came from a query.

The service reports on itself. Demand by topic and by method, urgency, response time, languages served, facilities verified, accessibility attributes recorded, ratings left, stock-outs logged. Filtered by period, province and channel, exported as CSV or as a branded PDF.

That means an evaluator does not have to take our word for anything. The figures on these slides can be regenerated, with the date stamped on them.

18 · What we would build next

Six things, in the order
they change a number.

01
Method-specific counselling content, written with clinicians

What each method does to bleeding, in the first three months, in plain words and in every language. The gap where discontinuation happens.

Months 1–6
02
Self-injection (DMPA-SC) guidance and referral

The method a young person can use without returning to a facility, supported end to end: who can start it, where, and what to do at week thirteen.

Months 3–12
03
Verified network to 500 facilities, phone number mandatory

Human verification, family planning method availability recorded per site, and the public map opened past the single country it serves today.

Months 1–18
04
Provider scorecards published

Youth ratings aggregated per facility and shared back with district teams, so that being unwelcoming to adolescents has a consequence.

Months 6–18
05
A stock-out feed partners can subscribe to

Youth-reported commodity gaps, by facility and week, delivered to the people who can move stock rather than filed in a report.

Months 6–24
06
Independent evaluation of what it changes

Method knowledge, intention, uptake and continuation among users against a comparison group, designed with a research partner and published either way.

Months 12–24
19 · The ask

A 24-month investment
in the hour nobody staffs.

Every clinic in the network closes at five. The question does not. What we are asking to fund is the only part of the family planning system that is awake when a young person finally decides to ask, and that will still hand them a verified door in the morning.

2Years
13 → 20Countries
500Verified facilities
1Independent evaluation

Budget and country selection to be confirmed with the foundation

A generated programme report
Thank you

She is already awake.
She just needs the range,
and the map, to be bigger.

Aunty Mimi a product of The Youth Platform Three Sixty

auntymimi.org · theyouthplatform.org · built with Pinch Africa