UNICEF: Bebbo Parenting App

The Client

UNICEF, the United Nations agency for children, works to protect the rights of every child, especially the most disadvantaged and those hardest to reach. Across more than 190 countries and territories, the organization does whatever it takes to help children survive, thrive and fulfill their potential. It provides and advocates for education, health and nutrition services; protects children from violence and abuse; brings clean water and sanitation to those in need; and keeps children safe from climate change and disease. 

The Situation

UNICEF identified a global need for accessible, expert-backed parenting support — especially for families with children from birth to six years old. Traditional parenting guidance often failed to reach families in remote or resource-constrained settings, while digital solutions were typically commercial, limited to wealthier regions, or lacked evidence-based content. 

UNICEF aimed to bridge this gap by developing Bebbo, an innovative, open-source parenting app that could deliver expert guidance, developmental tracking, age-appropriate activities, health monitoring, and immunization tracking to parents worldwide. The organization needed a solution that could scale across diverse countries and cultures while integrating with national health systems.

The Challenge

Creating Bebbo required the team to face numerous development and adoption barriers:

• Overcoming awareness and trust barriers in communities accustomed to relying on informal sources for parenting advice
• Building national-level partnerships to integrate Bebbo into government health and education systems
• Addressing socioeconomic inequities to ensure free access in low-income, refugee, and crisis-affected regions
• Engaging fathers in parenting by designing gender-inclusive content that encouraged equal participation
• Creating a scalable platform that content editors could easily customize for different languages, cultural contexts, and national policies
• Ensuring robust offline functionality for families lacking stable internet connectivity
• Protecting user privacy while still providing personalized recommendations
• Maintaining user retention and engagement over time

The Solution

UNICEF implemented a comprehensive three-phase approach to develop and scale the Bebbo parenting app:

Planning and development: The team conducted extensive user research including focus groups, surveys, and diary studies with parents to understand their challenges and needs. UNICEF built a scalable, flexible digital platform designed for rapid multi-country deployment and real-time content updates. The organization partnered with pediatricians, psychologists, and child development specialists to provide highly credible, localized content.

Deployment and scaling: UNICEF collaborated with health ministries and pediatric associations to align Bebbo with national child health and early childhood development programs. The organization trained over 50,000 health workers and early educators to use Bebbo as a parenting job aid. The solution integrated interactive tools to create personalized parenting journeys.

Continuous learning and evolution: The team implemented ongoing UI/UX enhancements based on real-time user feedback, expanded content to include support tools for parents of children with disabilities, and executed public outreach campaigns through social media, national TV, and telecom partnerships.

UNICEF partnered with Datamatics for technical development, EPAM Systems for strategic platform guidance, and GitHub for open-source community management to support Bebbo’s implementation and growth. Acquia Cloud Platform and Drupal's multi-site architecture played important roles in Bebbo's success:

• Acquia's cloud hosting infrastructure facilitated seamless scaling across multiple countries while ensuring high performance, security, and compliance with privacy regulations
• Drupal's multi-site architecture shared a core platform while allowing for country-specific subsites with customized content, language, and policies
• The content management system supported the rapid creation, translation, and management of parenting content in multiple languages
• Performance optimizations — including CDN integration and caching mechanisms — ensured fast load times even for users with low-bandwidth connections

The Results

The Bebbo Parenting App reached a global audience, enhancing parenting knowledge across the world:

Global reach: The app now supports 1.4 million parents across 15 countries — with expansion to at least four more planned for 2025 — delivering content in 15 languages with offline capabilities for rural and crisis-affected areas.

Improved parenting knowledge: A survey of over 10,000 users found that 84% felt more confident in supporting their child's development, while 79% gained better awareness of vaccinations, breastfeeding, and child safety.

Health system integration: More than 5,000 healthcare workers and early educators use Bebbo to provide trusted guidance to parents, improving child health monitoring and early learning.

High user satisfaction: 87% of parents report being "happy" or "very happy" with the app, indicating strong engagement and value.

Recognition as a Digital Public Good: Bebbo has earned international accolades for its contribution to global early childhood initiatives.

Bebbo has successfully bridged the parenting knowledge gap — particularly in low-resource settings — by replacing misinformation with expert-verified guidance. Its free, multilingual content ensures that marginalized communities, refugee families, and rural parents receive the same high-quality parenting support as urban users. The solution actively strengthens parent-child interactions, fosters early learning, and promotes gender-inclusive caregiving by increasing father engagement, all while strengthening national healthcare systems.