Honey & Banana:
The Chatbot Helping Young Nigerians Access Clear, Accurate Contraceptive Information
At exactly 9:12 p.m on a humid Lagos night, Rukayat (not real name) sat cross-legged on her bed, listening to the sound of raindrops hitting the roof and trickling down her windowpane.
Her thumb hovered over the screen of her phone. She had been replaying the same thought for weeks, a whisper that grew louder with every conversation among her friends and cousins: “what if using contraception makes me barren?”
She was 23, single, and deeply aware of the consequences of being discovered asking such questions in her community. The shame would be heavy and the judgement unbearable. Yet, tonight, something about the quiet, the hum of her ceiling fan, and the privacy of her room gave her just enough courage to type the words.
“Will family planning make me barren?”
She expected nothing. Maybe a robotic error message or no reply at all. But within seconds three dots began to dance on her screen, as if someone on the other end was taking her question seriously. Then came the response: a clear explanation of her options, from pills to injectables to implants. It acknowledged the myths she had heard, clarified what was true and what was not, and even shared the location of the nearest clinic if she wanted to talk to a professional.
“For the first time, I felt like someone was listening,” she said. “I didn’t feel judged. I could ask anything.”
That exchange was not with a family member or friend. It was with Honey & Banana, an AI-powered, multilingual sexual and reproductive health chatbot, a tool designed to quietly rewrite the rules of family planning for a generation caught between cultural silence and digital curiosity.
The crisis of silence
Nigeria has long struggled with low uptake of modern contraception, particularly among adolescents and young women. The statistics tell a sobering story with modern contraceptive prevalence rate (mCPR) among married and sexually active unmarried women aged 15 to 19 years stands at just 3.3% according to the 2023 Nigeria demographic health survey (NDHS). This is among the lowest rates globally.
In addition, the 2023 NDHS shows that the unmet need for family planning among girls in this age group is about 16%, rising to over 21% for women in their early twenties. These figures are not just statistics; they reflect millions of young women facing unintended pregnancies, unsafe abortions, disrupted education, and worsening gender inequality.
Comprehensive sexual and reproductive health education policies exist on paper but are inconsistently implemented. Many healthcare providers hold biases, openly discouraging unmarried adolescents from seeking contraceptives. Clinics are underfunded and often unwelcoming. Social stigma, including fear of judgement from family, community, and health providers leaves many young people afraid to even ask questions, and where silence dominates, misinformation fills the gaps. Stories about contraception causing infertility, cancer, or promiscuity spread far more easily than evidence-based answers.
It is in this context that Honey & Banana emerged, a collaboration between Data Science Nigeria (DSN), an AI-focused social enterprise; DKT International, one of the largest providers of contraceptives and family planning products in Nigeria, and Tulane University.
What they created is a chatbot that feels like chatting with a friend, yet its answers are medically accuracy and available in widely spoken Nigerian languages: English, Hausa, Yoruba, and soon Igbo and Pidgin.
Family planning is fundamental to women’s wellbeing, their children’s health, informed choice, and long-term economic stability.
Family planning is fundamental to women’s wellbeing, their children’s health, informed choice, and long-term economic stability.
Honey & Banana
Before you mix “honey & banana,” be sure you have the facts. Call 7790 for free, confidential family planning information.
Before you mix “honey & banana,” be sure you have the facts. Call 7790 for free, confidential family planning information.
A different kind of answer
At first, the idea seemed almost too simple. A chatbot? To address something as complex as reproductive health stigma? However, the design was intentional. Nigeria is one of Africa’s largest smartphone markets, with over 38.7 million active social media users.
For a young woman who cannot ask a question in class or at a clinic, a private chat window becomes a safe space, a barrier that shields her from judgement and stigma.
From the outset, DSN wanted the chatbot to do more than repeat medical jargon. It needed to feel alive, attuned to slang, and sensitive to cultural nuance.
Users can ask about “konji”, and it knows they mean being sexually aroused. Users say they are worried about a pregnancy after having unprotected sex and ask, “My bobo don score me; I wan handle am,” and it responds not scolding, but with empathy and proceeds to walk users through steps to take, including providing a referral to the nearest health facility to get emergency contraceptives.
When users ask where to get “better tampoline for knacking” and the AI app replies objectively, providing them with condom brand options, referring them to the closest pharmacy to procure their preferred brand choice.
This localisation, made possible by training the model with data from the DKT call centre, enables the bot to understand the way Nigerians speak, including local slang and street terms related to reproductive health. This is one of its standout features, setting it apart from generic AI models like MetaAI and ChatGPT, which are not as proficient at interpreting these nuanced expressions.
From curiosity to care
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From curiosity to care
The chatbot is only the front door. Behind it sits a larger ecosystem designed to ensure continuity of care, including a dedicated human call centre that provides family planning counselling and referral services. When a user’s questions reveal a need for deeper support, the system escalates seamlessly: offering the option to speak with a call centre agent or to be referred to a nearby clinic within DKT’s network.
Those who consent receive follow-up calls to ensure they got the service they need, and even months later, they might receive check-ins about whether they are still satisfied with the service rendered. In a healthcare landscape where follow-up is often nonexistent, this continuity stands out.
Precious Nwaogbo, who is the Associate Programme Director at DKT, explained that “access to information is one of the core components to behavioral change. DKT set up the Call center to cater to individuals who want family planning information and stigma free information to allow them make informed decisions on what contraceptive method to use and where to access services. We partner with clinics and maternity homes so that after giving information they know where to access these services”.
The DKT call centre responds to 300 to 500 successful calls each day. “Last year, 70% of the people who called us had never used modern contraceptives before,” Precious Nwaogbo, who is the Associate Programme Director at DKT, explained. “That shows we are reaching those who are curious but hesitant, exactly the audience we need to serve.”
The relationship between the chatbot and the call centre is cyclical. The chatbot acts as the initial entry point for many users, directing those who need deeper support to a call-centre agent. In turn, insights from call-centre conversations are continuously used to train and refine the chatbot through context-aware augmentation, ensuring it stays current, recognises local slang, and adapts to emerging family planning service-demand patterns.
DKT’s approach is not just digital; it is hybrid. Community mobilisers raise awareness on the ground, social media campaigns amplify the message online, the call centre offers family planning counselling guided by standardised protocols.
Together, they form what some experts describe as an “integrated digital-physical ecosystem,” that mirrors how people live, online, offline, and in constant motion between the two.
For Dr. Olubayo Adekanmbi, DSN’s founder, the goal was always to blend technology with empathy. “We felt that there was a need to create a more personal interactive platform, where you can ask any question at any time,” he said, adding that, “we saw the need to create an AI platform that leverages the capability of a chatbot to deliver personalised information in a very interactive manner that is also standardised.”
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