Making It Simple: What Is Manush-E?

Moner Bondhu, the largest and leading mental health startup has been working to address the mental health problem in Bangladesh, a country of 180 million citizens. We have reached 9.5 million people including students and children in Bangladesh along with 200,000 paid users.  However, mental health and well-being are not monitored and intervened in children, where the treatment gap is 94%. When we look globally, the picture doesn't change much. We need a technology-backed solution that can scale to multiple regions. 

To address this, Moner Bondhu has developed Manush-E - Our cutting-edge AI-based Child Nutrition and Mental Wellbeing system, where technology meets compassionate care.  Manush in the local language Bangali refers to a human being or an individual and also refers to the essence of humanity and people. Manush-E enhances children's well-being by using comprehensive tracking of children's nutrition and mental health through regular interactive and gamified assessments of the child and vital input data from teachers, caregivers, and parents. It uses AI and machine learning models to provide parents with real-time updates and personalised and actionable recommendations to maximise their child’s wellbeing.

Furthermore, Manush-E is also integrated with the existing Moner Bondhu service platform for intervention after monitoring, which includes counselling services, mental wellness activities, informative blogs, and courses, all accessible via a user-friendly app and web interface. 

By prioritising and optimising children's well-being through data-driven decision-making, Manush-E aims to reduce the mental health treatment gap among children. Our platform maximises resource allocation and provides early intervention, which increases children's productivity and quality of life. Early intervention also avoids future well-being-related problems.

Our Inspiration: The Story Behind Manush-E

Our journey began with a simple but strong realisation: mental health services are frequently inaccessible, expensive, or stigmatised. Moner Bondhu has provided tech-enabled mental health services and online and offline counselling in Bangladesh and UAE since 2016. We witnessed children struggling, parents feeling helpless, and schools lacking the necessary resources. This prompted us to develop a technology-driven solution that democratises mental health care.

Manush-E was founded on the desire to ensure every child can grow up happy, healthy, and supported.

Manush-E integrates with our existing service infrastructure. The children get a culturalized and gamified experience to improve their physical, mental, nutritional, and academic needs. They can automatically know what type of intervention is required and when, and they can easily access those services from Moner Bondhu.

The Social Impact: Why Manush-E Matters

Today, children's mental health is a significant concern, particularly in vulnerable areas, where many children suffer in silence because they have little access to professional mental health care.

One out of every seven children globally suffers from a mental health issue, with the majority going misdiagnosed. Bangladesh, like many other countries, has a dangerously low ratio of mental health experts to children. Knowledge of and access to specialty mental health care are challenging in Bangladesh due to very low designated government resources, few specialty providers and concentration of resources in large urban centers in Bangladesh.

Many schools lack comprehensive well-being programs, leaving teachers and parents without the resources they need to support distressed children. World Health Organisation also found that there are no guidance counselors, school psychologists/social workers/nurses trained and deployed within Bangladesh public schools. Neurodevelopmental disorders are incorporated into national teacher training curriculum. Special education programming for children with serious emotional health problems is not also currently available, and mental health/substance use are not incorporated within life skills curriculum.

Manush-E is here to help bridge this gap. It is the first systematic public school capacity building initiative in Bangladesh to promote mental health among children and adolescents. By analysing behavioural patterns, stress indicators, and well-being data with AI, we can deliver timely interventions to children, parents, and educators, preventing crises from worsening. This allows for optimised and maximum use of the limited resources to direct every child towards proper care proactively instead of being reactive. 

We have already validated this proactive approach against school-going children, whom we divided into two groups. We provided digital and human intervention using the prototype Manush-E to the treatment group and observed that they performed an average of 20% better on well-being scales after the intervention than the control group.

Frontier Technology

The strategic vision of Manush-E is to bridge the treatment gap and address the lack of human resources using cutting-edge technology. Smartphones and internet access are adequate among children, students and parents, even in remote regions of Bangladesh. Adopting the Manush-E app in these regions is not difficult because of how culturalized, multilingual and gamified the experience is. As soon as the system is integrated into households and schools, using Artificial Intelligence and data science will allow us to identify patterns among children that might otherwise go unnoticed by human observation alone.

Based on the collected data from how the child and the parent interact with the app, Manush-E AI can personalise recommendations to each child's specific emotional and behavioural needs. The recommendations start from digital content-based awareness to full counselling sessions from our experts or any local expert integrated into the app, depending on the severity.

This approach makes mental health care more accessible to millions of children, especially in resource-constrained locations, where accurate ground data can be the difference between a child getting adequate resources or not. The more data our system processes, the smarter it becomes, resulting in more accurate well-being assessments.

Moner Bondhu also addresses the privacy concerns of tech-dependent health solutions, especially when it comes to children and mental health. We ensure all the collected data is stored encrypted, and Personally Identifiable Information is never provided to any stakeholders other than for counselling interventions. All data is anonymised before any machine learning models are trained or run on it.

What Makes Manush-E Unique?

Manush-E is a unique mental health tool because it uses AI and predictive analytics to detect early indicators of distress in a proactive approach. It provides a holistic assessment of mental, emotional, and physical well-being while bringing together children, parents, educators, and professionals in a single ecosystem.

The system is also culturally adaptive and can be adopted into any language to break the cultural barriers of mental health, ensuring relevance and efficacy.

Why Open Source?

Moner Bondhu values transparency, cooperation, and community-driven innovation. Manush-E is a tool with high prospects which will allow us to take care of our children better. This is why it was a unanimous decision from our team to make the software license free and open source, allowing any developers or stakeholders worldwide to not only contribute and improve the platform but deploy it in any region in a customised localised way for the region.

Our Plans with UNICEF’s Venture Fund Investment

With UNICEF's support, we hope to enhance our AI models for early diagnosis of mental health disorders.

We are expanding our pilot program in many schools in Bangladesh, especially in remote regions, to ensure children receive real-time support. We also plan to implement multilingual, multicultural, and contextual support to make Manush-E accessible to multiple foreign language-speaking users in other regions, which can be quickly done with funding opportunities.

Furthermore, with the funding, we can easily scale the project to support more users, increasing outreach and adoption of Manush-E. This would create a feedback loop to develop the entire system, as we would have access to more user experience, data, and feedback. Working closely with educational institutions and policymakers to integrate Manush-E into the education system will ensure its sustainable and long-term impact. Once the project is streamlined, future deployments and scaling can be done at significantly less cost.

The investment is a catalyst for growth, allowing us to take Manush-E to the next level.

Our First 100 Days

As we collect data on children's comprehensive wellness, we have taken precautions by developing Privacy Policies and Compliance frameworks in close consultation with our Data Privacy and Security Mentor. These have been integrated into our data collection system. We ensure that the data collected does not contain any personally identifiable information. Additionally, we have obtained consent from their guardians and parents for the use of their data.

We have established the groundwork for open-sourcing our project in the future, including a licensing strategy, project charter, and comprehensive documentation.

Additionally, we are thrilled to announce that we have completed testing with two schools in Dhaka, Khaserhaat Syed Abdul Hussain School and College and Chorfote Bahadur High School. We plan to continue reaching out to more schools after the Ramadan season in Bangladesh, starting in April 2025.

Way Forward

We're thrilled to be a part of the UNICEF Venture Fund cohort and work alongside like-minded innovators. Over the coming year, we will improve our technology, expand our reach, and strive toward our vision of a world where every child receives the well-being care they need. 

Please reach out to our team at [email protected] or follow us on LinkedIn.