As part of a mentorship initiative with UC San Diego Global TIES, our technology department has been working tirelessly to create The Celeste Health Initiative App (CHI-APP), a project management application catered towards grassroots initiatives. With this application, we hope to streamline the project development process for NGOs and grassroots organizations focused on sustainable development, and provide a centralized platform where all initiative resources can be easily accessed, organized, and shared. The web application will be used first and foremost by Project Kilimanjaro as we implement menstrual health management initiatives and mobile clinics in underserved regions of Tanzania and India. As many of our partners make use of the application, we hope to catalyze the start global co-design initiatives through this simplified platform.

This application was designed with the unique needs of socially-culturally sustainable development organizations in mind. It provides organization administrators with the ability to create and define projects that they can track. Within each project, they will be able to select from customized templates with relevant components for their project and add or remove sections as desired. Components expected to be included in the initial release range from more specialized tools such as a survey creation and collection tool to more widely needed tools such as a project workflow and task management tool. Current pre-defined templates are catered to the missions of International Health Research, Women’s Health, and Water Sanitation focused NGOs. The entire application is created with diverse teams in mind and includes translation features, help guides, and an approachable user interface.

While designing this application, our ultimate goal is to make our organization work more effectively and efficiently and to better facilitate initiatives with global networks. A primary objective of this application is to give the ability to non-profit organizations in the healthcare space to overcome cultural and linguistic barriers to create programs that best fit the needs of the target community.

This application was designed and developed by members of Project Kilimanjaro and our technical partner, Innovation Consulting, with special acknowledgement going to Athena Doshi, Bella Liang, Jelan Waly, Pauline Thatch from Project Kilimanjaro, and Archana Jain, Aesha Kapoor, and Santosh Yadhav from Innovation Consulting. We are grateful for our partner’s involvement from across the globe in this success!

While details regarding the implementation of our pilot initiative are still to be determined, we hope to support our grassroots partners in scaling women’s health initiatives within their own communities. Aligned with our mission, we foresee this application having genuine, sustainable change in the creation and development of public health initiatives for years to come.

Co-designing CHI-APP
Making public health more accessible to those who need it.