Help build the listening company.
Sikivu is a Kenyan-led mental-wellness companion for East Africa — a clinical outcomes company, not an app company. We measure wellbeing, not downloads. And we’re building the founding team to get there.
Right now, the whole team is one person.
Lawrence founded Sikivu and currently does all of it — the engineering, the clinical research, the operations, and reading every message that lands in the contact inbox. One person can start something wonderful. It takes more than one to make it timeless. That’s why this page exists.
Before Sikivu was an app, it was a pattern I kept noticing.
People close to me needed someone to talk to and had nowhere to put it — not a diagnosis, not a prescription, just someone who would listen and keep it to themselves. Therapy cost more than many of them earned in a month. And where I come from, saying you’re struggling is often heard as saying you’re going mad — so most people say nothing.
The ones who did want help carried a second fear. Before opening up, they had to weigh whether the person across from them would hold the secret or pass it around. Many decided it wasn’t worth the risk. They kept the weight, and kept quiet.
One question stayed with me: if the privacy were real, and the safeguards were real, could technology let a person be heard without the fear of being exposed — and give them something useful back?
That question became Sikivu — listening, in Kiswahili. Built to do the one thing those people couldn’t reliably find: to listen, in the language they actually speak, without judgement, and without telling.
— Lawrence Juma, founder
The problem
For the people we’re building for, professional care is too scarce, too costly, or too exposing to reach. The need doesn’t disappear when help is out of reach — it just goes unspoken.
What we believe
That a private, judgement-free companion — grounded in proven techniques and built for how people move between English and Kiswahili — can give someone somewhere to be heard. And that we can measure whether it genuinely helps, rather than assume it does. We’re testing that with real people, and we’ll say plainly whether it holds.
Where another pair of hands changes everything.
We’re pre-launch, with funding and our first clinical hire still ahead of us. Most of these are open as expressions of interest — paid where we can, volunteer where we can’t yet. If the mission fits, we want to know you. If you’re unsure, err on the side of reaching out anyway.
Engineering
Build a privacy-first, offline-capable product. On-device ML, real-time sync, and a crisis path that has to work without a network.
- React Native / Expo
- Next.js + TS
- Supabase / Postgres
- On-device ML
Clinical & Safety
Keep the product safe and evidence-based — crisis thresholds, safe-messaging copy, and our outcome-measurement battery. Our first pre-launch hire.
- Clinical advisor
- Crisis review
- PHQ-9 · GAD-7
Community Stewards
Trained community mental-health workers who hold Sikivu Circles and peer-chat safety — the human layer behind the pipeline. Paid, part-time, remote at launch.
- Community MH background
- Group facilitation
- English + Kiswahili
Marketing & Growth
Reach East African users with a voice that fits their lives — culturally grounded, Kiswahili-comfortable, free of growth-hacking and urgency.
- Content & brand
- Community & social
- Lifecycle
Operations & Partnerships
Turn a Kenyan-led product into a sustainable organisation — NGO and employer pilots, grants, and the day-to-day that keeps a small team moving.
- NGO / employer pilots
- Grants & fundraising
- People & ops
Design & Research
Shape an anxiety-aware product and learn from the people we serve — interface design, and qualitative research with East African users.
- Product / UX design
- User research
- Accessibility
A founder’s biggest risk is not knowing what they don’t know.
If you have depth in any of these — or something we haven’t thought to list — an hour of your perspective changes what we build. Advisors give as little or as much time as they can.
How to reach us
There’s no portal yet — and you’d be writing to Lawrence directly. Send a note: who you are, what you’d work on, and why East African mental health matters to you. A link to your work (GitHub, portfolio, LinkedIn) helps.
Get in touch →