Khulduli App: An Amazing First Endeavor to Educate Adolescents about their Sexual Health

Ever so rarely an app comes along that just bursts with usefulness and productivity. Such an app is Khulduli. At the time of writing this article, Khulduli is only available in Android.

In a nutshell, Khulduli is a mobile application developed by the National Health Education Information & Communications Centre (NHEICC) under the Ministry of Health, with support from the United Nations Population Fund (UNFPA), and the German Development Cooperation (GIZ) to provide information about sexual & reproductive health for adolescents and young people.

The name ‘Khulduli’ roughly translates to curiosity in English. This may represent the questions that adolescents find themselves asking about their body during adolescence.

The lay of the land

The app is simple to use. It has got this light purplish-blue and white theme going on. This app strictly adheres to the material design guidelines from Google. The top third portion of the app is covered by slideshows of warnings and suggestions like ‘use condoms’, ‘abortion is not a remedy for family planning’. Below it, there are several options like Topics, Myths, and facts, Notices and Info etc. All these options appear as cards and each of them is colored differently. So, it gives a little visual flair to the app.

The topmost part of the app is a blue strip that reads Khulduli, Healthy Nepal, Prosperous Nepal. At its left side is a hamburger menu inside which the same options that were available in the colored cards are listed. The bottommost part is also a white strip with four options – home, bookmarks, safety alert, and emergency contacts.

What’s inside?

What makes this app special isn’t the design. It’s the content. Inside topics (an option on the home screen) there are sections like Adolescent age, love affection and sex relationship, menstruation, drug and substance abuse etc. Inside these sections are questions that an adolescent might have. For example, “Why does a person’s voice change during adolescence?”, “Why are breasts sizes different among girls?” If you have questions about your body or want to know more about humans in general, this app might be interesting to you. Of course, there are other more serious questions like “How to reduce the risk of infection in the genital area?”, “What to do if Condoms burst during sexual intercourse?” In my opinion, this app is a better source for sex education than the books that they teach in the school.

There are also other functions in the app like Clinic Finder where you can type the name of a hospital or clinic and it will give you the address as a link to google maps. There is also a menstruation tracker.

There is an option to send a safety alert to your 3 trusted friends or family if you feel like you are in danger. There is also a section that has all the necessary emergency contacts to sexual and reproductive health counseling services in case you need one.

Thoughts

This app is an amazing first endeavor to educate adolescents about their sexual health. Important information is propagated in clear and concise language. Sections like myths and facts aim to educate people about the myths regarding menstruation, sex, and pregnancy. This app might just make talking about these taboo subjects fun and much more comfortable.

However, from a technical view, this app still isn’t quite as polished as it could be. The app froze more than 3 times during my brief spell while I was scrolling through some questions and I had to remove the app from my RAM before I could use it again. Also, there are some design oddities. Suppose I click on ‘Topics’ from the home screen. There I click on ‘Nutritional health’. Now, when I browse through the questions, there is no indication inside which option these questions fall. This may be nitpicking but it adds to the overall feel of the app. We hope that after some updates and refinements, these problems will be solved.

Download Khulduli app