Bringing Personal Care Products and Empowerment to Women in East Africa
Women and girls around the world face the challenge of handling their menstrual cycles with dignity. Some cultures banish women when they have their periods, causing them to experience isolation and shame. Other systems slap unjust taxes on menstrual care items or make them difficult to obtain—an obstacle that becomes even harder the more traditional and lower income the society.
To Joanna Bichsel, these atrocities against women are “insane.” The unjust reality “that women cannot get these basic products,” she says, gravely impacts communities, societies, and economies, at large. Research shows that girls are more likely to skip school when they cannot properly manage their periods. On the flip side, when a woman has the ability to take control of her health, there are significant individual and collective positive impacts.
This evidence is what drove Bichsel to co-found, Kasha, an e-commerce business for women’s health and self-care in East Africa. Founded in 2016 by Bichsel and Amanda Arch, Kasha provides women in both rural and urban areas the ability to order affordable products—menstrual care items, soaps, lotions, makeup, family planning care—in an easy and discreet way. Bichsel founded the company after working for more than a decade as a software engineer for Microsoft, and later leading technology strategy for global development for The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. Her career offered her a global view of the role technology plays in emerging markets and bettering societies, which she ultimately parlayed into founding Kasha.
Today the company operates in two countries, Rwanda and Kenya, with plans to scale globally. The need for Kasha’s offerings is as certain as its mission. “Given how these products have the ability to change a woman’s life, to change the complete trajectory of generations, this is unacceptable,” says Bichsel. “So Kasha was built to be able to enable women to confidently order products and get them discreetly delivered no matter where they live.”
(Editor’s Note: The following was pulled from the original conversation between Eva Yazhari, Ed Stevens, and Joanna Bichsel for The Beyond Capital Podcast.)
A Q&A with Joanna Bichsel
The majority of Kasha customers are low income in Rwanda and in Kenya. What is the model?
It is e-commerce, but it’s not your typical ecommerce, which you may typically think of as websites and credit cards. Kasha is built to be very accessible to anyone with a basic mobile phone, so anyone can order the health and self-care products they need and have them delivered. We use USSD (Unstructured Supplementary Service Data) technology that is available in emerging markets but not as available in developed markets. Anyone with a basic mobile phone can browse their categories, pick their product, pay with mobile money, and we deliver it to them—to the last mile.
Kasha was built to ensure that all women have the health products they need so they can live their best lives. We do serve across customer segments. We have mid-income to high-income women in urban areas, but the majority of our customers are low income women in rural areas across Rwanda and Kenya. It’s an accessible e-commerce platform so women can get the products they need on their terms.
How many products do you offer with a small menu-driven phone?
The screen is very small, so we don’t put all of our SKUS on the USSD menu. But we do have a way where anything that is on our website you can do a short code direct to a product. If you want to navigate through, we put the most popular products for more of the lower income segments first.
Before starting the company, I was always amazed with USSD. It’s something that’s used at scale for billions of people to get airtime and to do various things. It’s hugely accessible, but the only thing we really use it for is to get airtime. So our team turned that into e-commerce so anyone can access it.
It’s those very powerful technologies that are actually very simple. You actually cannot turn USSD on in America or Canada because it’s not exposed.
Why is women’s accessibility to health care products so important in Rwanda, Kenya, and East Africa?
The truth is, you often hear that women are very influential in the economy and in society and we should optimize for women, especially when you get more interested in global development. Women are a key focus. And yet, when you look at how we build solutions, women are massively underserved. When it comes to women getting the health products they need, the self-care products they need, and the basic things like menstrual care, women are massively underserved. And the more traditional the society, the more lower income, the harder it is for women. That, for me, is insane that women cannot get these basic products.
A lot of technology solutions are built by men. It does make a difference in who is building the tech. I think that women look at tech solutions differently. A lot of this stems from my experiences when I was at the Gates Foundation, for most of the time I worked on: How do we use technology to enable last-mile delivery of vaccines? To optimize supply chains of health? Very often, we would be in rural areas in Ethiopia, Kenya, or other countries and we would visit clinics and ask them what products they were out of stock. Very often, we’d hear “we’re out of stock of malaria products, this and this.” But when we would ask about family planning, we’d often hear “no, we’re not out of stock of that. We don’t get too much demand. Women who come with their babies are usually the ones who ask for this. Young people don’t ask for this.” In reality, there’s a high teenage pregnancy rate. Many women say they want access to these products yet they cannot go in person to get these products.
So, there are a lot of scenarios that are different for women. If we try to optimize the supply chain so that the clinics don’t get out of stock, we actually do not solve the problem. Women still don’t get these products in their hand because there is so much social stigma.
How do you not become a stigmatized company?
We specifically built Kasha so it does not become a stigmatized company. Kasha is around health and self-care. And while at the core we started the company because we wanted to enable access to contraceptive, menstrual care, and HIV tests, we sell a variety of products for your body and health. We sell lotions, creams, makeup. So if you were to go to our website, which is visible internationally, you will see a wide variety of products around health and self-care.
If you see what people are buying, it’s those stigmatized products that are flying off the shelves. So that obviously proves that those products are extra hard to access. We always knew that if we focused only on a stigmatized subset of that, we would become a stigmatized company and we would do our customers a disservice.
How has your data and consumer research evolved Kasha?
When we first started out, we did not have makeup or deodorant on the platform. We did not have the wide variety that we have now. There has always been a demand for makeup. There was a concern at some point. For one, makeup is difficult to sell, especially with matching skin tones and things like that. We thought that maybe people will just buy makeup and that will be what the demand is. What we found is whenever we posted about makeup or showed a shiny, glamorous photo, we had more of an interest and people clicked on those images. But when they arrived on the site, what they actually ended up buying was more of those essentials. It was a really interesting thing to see what people want and what people demand is not necessarily what they buy.
In the end, we exist to serve our customers. If they prefer this brand or product, we get that for them. We’ve had some questions in the past about why we sell international products. We sell Proctor and Gamble, we sell Unilever. That is because that is what our customers want. We do sell local brands as well, but if the customer prefers this internationally well-known brand, then that is her decision.
Have you seen that your investors and other stakeholders in the company have seen the value and the social impact that you’ve been able to create?
We’re very lucky to have investors that are very aligned with our mission as a company. The great thing about Kasha is that the more our business grows, the more our impact grows. The more of these products we provide access to, the more we sell, the more impact we have and the stronger our business is. So it is very directly tied. I do like to partner with investors that have a good balance of commercial as well as impact. There is a wide spectrum, but for us, we are focused on becoming a profitable company that can scale around the world. The reason we want to do that is because we want to ensure that no woman ever has a problem getting access to the products she needs. That’s why we want to be able to scale—and we want to be able to scale with the customer being in charge rather than any donor or investor.
Menstrual care has always been a focus for Kasha. There’s so many girls around the world that do not have access to quality menstrual care. And you can imagine that if a girl cannot attend school for three or five days every single month, that’s 20 percent of her school days off. Eventually she falls behind, she drops out, and that is happening still to this day.
Kasha really tried to understand how we can serve young girls in getting access to these products. What we found was that in Rwanda, where we started, girls generally don’t have any money. Girls generally don’t have access to a phone. How can we make this profitable model? We tried to reach the parents, but the parents were always all over the countries. So what we decided was to work with the schools. Now, the schools purchase from Kasha in bulk. Every quarter the schools can buy thousands of pads from Kasha, which are quality and affordable products, and they give those to their students. (Editor’s Note: The Kenyan government provides funding for schools to offer menstruating students pads.) So, you can still create a solution where the end consumer is not the customer.
What does scaling in a region like East Africa look like?
Scaling means different things to different people. For us, it is really around customer acquisition and how many customers we are serving, and also expansion into new markets. Our customers are buying monthly types of products. We are not operating into two countries. When we say we’re interested in scaling even further, we do have plans to be able to operate into additional countries on the continent and to one day be able to operate in many countries in Africa, Asia, and Latin America. So that’s what I think of when I think of scale: It’s at a global level.
Do you see the attitudes that create the social stigma changing, and in response to that, your business changing?
There are polarized opinions of this. One example is that Rwanda has publicly committed to very ambitious goals around contraceptive access. And they’ve always been a champion for women’s empowerment and family planning access. And yet, there are many groups in Rwanda that are absolutely opposed to that. So that is a dynamic where the government is moving these social issues forward, but a country has to move together. It’s about being able to make baby steps in this direction. For example, Kasha was asked to help lead a policy change in Rwanda. Up until then, girls (and boys) who were under eighteen could only get contraceptives if they were with their parents. Kasha helped to lower the age of that to sixteen. So that’s one step.
I think partnership and collaboration with governments is very important and I see many within government, private sector, and public sector that want to innovate, that want to push things forward, that want to make it easier. Perhaps one reason why within the social issue space you don’t move as fast as perhaps in a Silicon Valley is because there are so many issues at play. You can go fast if you go alone, and you can go slow if you go together—but you’ll go further.
You hire local sales agents, and hire local women from the communities that Kasha is selling in. Why did you adopt this strategy?
The way we deliver to low income and rural areas is through Kasha agents. These are women that, within their community, are the face of Kasha. They deliver their customer’s orders to the last mile. They market Kasha. They help customers if they need help ordering. And that model is one that is operating around the world in every developing country that I know of. That is the model of community health volunteers, community health workers, agriculture extension workers. And so we adapted that model for Kasha agents. The difference is that usually that model is unpaid. Community volunteers for the government are providing health services around her community at no charge. But for us, we have a performance-based incentive model. The more that the Kasha agent delivers, and the more customers she tells about Kasha, the more recurring customers she brings back and the more money she makes. We have agents that have been with us since the very beginning. They’re building houses, and they’re able to send their kids to school, and pay for health insurance. They continue to increase in their salaries and the company continues to grow.
When I went to the Gates Foundation, I looked at things from a technologist lens and also from a different perspective. That is where the solution for Kasha came together: Using USSD for commerce; using community health volunteers as Kasha agents; data-driven supply chains that are consumer driven. Nothing that we built is not already operating at scale in many countries around the world. We just repurposed the solution and repackage various components into something that really solves a need of where there’s a gap.
What challenges has Kasha faced during the COVID-19 pandemic?
At Kasha, we feel very strongly that we have a role to play in helping people protect themselves from COVID. When COVID first hit, we saw a spike around many products—soaps, hand sanitizer, masks. Initially we had some stock-outs. But since then, we’ve still been able to operate around both countries. We’ve been identified as an essential service because we do deliver medicines and other COVID-protection products, as well. For us, it hasn’t impacted our business too much. Rwanda and Kenya both had their first case around the same time, and they had quite different reactions. Rwanda went into lockdown pretty soon after. So there have been constant adjustments in just the way we operate, how we can deliver getting the right paperwork to be able to show the authorities. The team was really amazing in terms of continuing to overcome the challenges. But we actually continued to grow and we’re able to continue to provide the products that people need.
We are all working virtually. I think working virtually is a very new phenomenon in East Africa. As a tech company, our engineering team is very used to working from home; others have been adjusting. We realize that it can also be stressful for people and for the team, so we’ve implemented virtual fun activities and we’ve started a committee, Kasha Cares, where as employees we can impact our communities by helping them out and donating products.
Where do you see Kasha in five or ten years?
I want Kasha to change the way that women in emerging markets get the health products that they need. I do see Kasha, one day, serving millions of women around the world, ensuring they have access to products, to information, to health services. We’re really focused on continuing to grow, to expand, and to listen to our customers and to see where else can we be of service. We do have plans to expand into two additional countries in Africa in the near future. And we do want to expand into Asia and Latin America at some point.
Global health in the developing countries is extremely top down. There is no data that can show what people want, the products they want, at what time of the year they want it. And so this is really where Kasha has the opportunity to change the world. As a data-driven platform, every time someone purchases a product, it’s a vote for the product they want. We will be able to show that for people living in this area, these are the products they want; these are the products they’re willing to spend their money on because they need them. Through that data-driven approach, we can completely turn global health supply chains upside down and make them consumer-driven. That’s the big picture of Kasha and that’s what’s possible with an e-commerce platform that is selling products in East Africa.
To learn more about Joanna Bichsel and Kasha, visit kasha.co.
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