RAAJI ran for six years. When I moved to the United States, I handed it to the partners rather than run it at half strength from another continent. It held. The NGOs deployed their own versions, constrained for their contexts and the topics they cared about. The reusable-pad design went out without copyright, and nonprofits used it during the 2022 floods.
i have never been attached to the innovation. only to the problem.
Six years, four languages — and every grant we won funded us to keep going, never to scale. Death by small grants. I don't say that bitterly; it is the condition most organizations like mine live in, and the reason so few of them outlive their founders.
RAAJI outlived me because I gave it away before I had to. The original organisation closed when the funding ended; partners went on to run their own adaptations, and the chatbot on this site is a rebuilt demo. The pad design was released open and turned up in flood relief in 2022, in places I've never been.
The problem was never the chatbot. The problem was shame — and I went at it through literacy, education, technology, media, advocacy, training, and kept whichever one moved the women in front of me. RAAJI was one of those. The work was never mine to hold.
researchers ask why i didn't keep going. i didn't keep going because the innovation had to.