In 2019 friends Tafi Mazikana and Sherrie Steyn were chatting about mental health. Tafi shared his life-changing experience of receiving digital support for his mental health difficulties through the NHS Increasing Access to Psychological Treatment (IAPT) service.
He knew that Sherrie had trained and worked in an IAPT service as a Psychological Wellbeing Practitioner. Together they wondered how they could help increase psychological support and access for ‘the people back home’. Their passion was such that they committed to researching and developing a low-cost, easily accessible treatment option specifically for the African market, and so, in 2020 Vimbo Health was born.
A Journey Informed by Lived Experience
Growing up in Zimbabwe, mental health is not something Tafi ever heard discussed:
“The main form of mental health care I knew of was inpatient care. I knew psychologists existed but talking therapy was something I associated with American movies – it wasn’t something “my people” did. I had no real-world examples of people who had experienced either talking therapy or any form of early intervention.
After high school I went on to study finance in the UK, joined accounting firm Ernst & Young, and then entered the high-octane London banking sector. Throughout this a lot of “life” happened. I also became very educated with 2 degrees in finance and even a professional qualification as a Chartered Accountant, but my knowledge of mental health was entirely unchanged from when I left Zimbabwe as that young dreadlocked 18-year-old!
My mental health difficulties developed gradually – consider that innocent negative thought repeated too often and accidentally becoming a belief. I had developed positive habits like a passion for fitness, but I didn’t have the tools to either identify or correct the negative thinking patterns that also crept in through simply living and being alive! Those blind spots could have been easily resolved through early action, but over time slowly manifested into severe anxiety and depression. I think of a frog in boiling water, unaware of its circumstances.
In the 12 years leading up to 2019, I had experienced fleeting moments when I wondered if mental health is something I should explore, but I feared that opening this pandora’s box could directly lead to what I then considered a scary new life of medication and in-patient care. And so, my response was to “man-up” and get on with life. “Surely everyone deals with their own challenges, this is normal”, I told myself.
Stumbling across IAPT’s self-referral online form was the first time taking that first step felt doable. Once assessed I chose Digital CBT as the form of help I would engage in, mainly due to my immense fear of having to verbalise for the first time (and to a stranger) thoughts that I had never expressed. I chose the digital option as my “easy way out”, but from the moment I started I was hooked and I was able to recover from those longstanding difficulties through digital CBT alone.
I became passionate about sharing this self-referral link with everyone I know, much to the annoyance of many friends! I realised that the same stigmas I had also existed in London, as more than once I heard “thanks send me the link, but it’s not for me it’s for someone I know!” . I really wanted to see more people get this type of help and not needlessly suffer. I also increasingly wondered why similar types of help do not exist for my people back home. I had lived in the UK long enough to understand the cultural nuances of the programme that helped me but also knew that my cultural background was missing from my experience of it. Who was going to think about creating home-grown solutions infused with our culture which is so different?
Enter Sherrie Steyn, and our conversation that changed both of our lives and hopefully can impact many others.”
Development
We were committed to creating a scientifically backed and tested app-based mental health intervention. The goal was to increase access to culturally appropriate, high-quality psychological treatment and support through a low resource, cost-effective treatment option. The ability for the app to be integrated into a stepped-care model was crucial. The NHS has adopted the stepped-care model with enough success that the World Health Organisation now encourages services to use it.
As a result, Vimbo was developed based on principles of Cognitive Behavioural Therapy (CBT), and with infrastructure to support the introduction of Stepped Care in low resource settings.
The Vimbo Health App provides a self-guided treatment for depression and anxiety that utilises Cognitive Behavioral Therapy techniques, adapted for African context and culture. It crafts a bespoke programme for each user, building skills in a structured manner through text, audio, and a range of evidence-based tools. Considerations for the South African market included a low-data usage platform, cultural adaptation through local language, tone, and topics.
Research Evidence
Internationally the evidence has emerged for the effectiveness of Digital Therapeutics. However, there have been few studies overall when compared to the volume of platforms available, and Africa is not well represented in research. Given this, we felt it imperative to conduct an ethically approved pilot research study locally in South Africa, testing the effectiveness and safety of the Vimbo App.
A pilot research study was conducted in South Africa on the Vimbo Health App. This was ethically approved by the Human Sciences Research Council (HSRC) and conducted in partnership with the South African Depression and Anxiety Group (SADAG).
The study recruited participants through SADAG’s support groups, call lines and social media, and was open to South African residents aged 18 and over for the 12-week study period.
In this study, 69% (77/112) of users were retained using a 2-week metric, and 52% of those retained with Moderate Levels of Depression and/ or Anxiety were seen to recover based on PHQ9 and GAD7 scoring measures.
This research was published in JMIR Formative Research Vol 9 (2025). To read the full publication, click here.
Future Plans For 2025 and Beyond
Our goal is to positively impact 1 million lives in Africa and the Global South by 2030, and to be an enabler to Stepped Care on the continent.
Partnerships with local healthcare systems will help us to bring our approach to localisation, whilst implementing cost effective system wide Stepped Care strategies. At a system level, our goal is to increase access whilst simultaneously reducing cost!
Several planned initiatives take us in that direction, and we’re extremely excited by the desire for evidence-based solutions that carry local lived experiences in their DNA.
To learn more about Vimbo Health, visit www.vimbohealth.com, or contact Co-founder and CEO Tafi Mazikana at [email protected].
