Forget the couch: Hakini moves to improve access to online therapy
▶ Palestinian telehealth platform seeks $750,000 to expand across region,
As a Palestinian woman living in the West Bank, Sondos Mleitat came to realise how difficult it was to find reliable and cheap mental health services after a long search for suitable and consistent support.
Once she experienced the life-changing benefits of counselling, she began to see the glaring gap in the market for services that are culturally sensitive, budget-friendly and provide easy access.
Ms Mleitat quit her job as an architectural engineer and, together with Majd Manadre and Mohannad Amarneh, set up telehealth start-up Hakini.
The Ramallah start-up seeks to provide online mental health services in Arabic to users in Palestine and the wider Middle East as people deal with the devastating effects of Covid-19, the reality of living under occupation and the stigma of seeking counselling, particularly for women.
Hakini, which means “tell me” or “talk to me” in Arabic, remotely connects users to therapists based on their needs and offers guidance for self-help intervention.
“We started to realise the pain with finding mental health services in Palestine and the Mena region,” Ms Mleitat says.
“The [current] solutions are inefficient in the short term and expensive in the long term. Many people are not getting the mental health support they need, so we see a huge opportunity for Hakini to provide a solution.”
The pandemic has put mental health technology start-ups under the spotlight, with 2020 being a record year for venture capital investment in the sector, according to data company PitchBook.
According to its data, about $1.6 billion in venture capital investment was raised from 146 deals as of last December, compared to $893 million from 111 deals in 2019.
A decade ago there were only three deals, worth $6.6m.
Investment levels have increased after demand for mental health services grew during the pandemic, when disruptions to daily life and work, coupled with lockdown measures, triggered mental health issues and made them more prominent. Social distancing rules and health concerns pushed that demand online, making telehealth essential for care providers.
Hakini, which began operations in March 2020, recorded an increase in demand for online therapy services amid the global health pandemic.
“It was our time during Covid-19. The number of people suffering from anxiety and depression increased and they started to seek solutions online due to the lockdowns,” Ms Mleitat says.
“We see more interest from governments and the private sector in mental health.”
The pandemic uncovered weaknesses in health care that prompted companies to invest more in employee well-being and governments to increase their level of investment in mental health services, a typically underfunded segment.
“After Covid-19, our business was [affected] positively,” she says. “The stigma around mental health has reduced and people are more comfortable using technology.”
The difficulty of finding mental health services is further amplified in parts of Palestine, where economic conditions are deteriorating amid political crises, Hakini says.
“In the West Bank, where we started, less than 10 per cent of people seeking mental health services were able to find them,” Ms Mleitat says, citing Palestine’s Ministry of Health data and Hakini’s own calculations. “There is a huge need and people are not satisfied with the current solution.”
After the air strikes on the Gaza Strip in May, there was an influx of inquiries from people seeking counselling. Hakini provided 6,000 minutes of therapy for people in the strip based on a sponsorship model, where people pay on behalf of those who cannot afford sessions.
For Gaza, which has been under an Israeli blockade since 2007, the pandemic made life worse for people whose mobility was already restricted, a UN report shows.
“We need mental health solutions that are adapted to the Arab culture and experience, because not just any western concept is immediately applicable to the Arab region,” Ms Mleitat says.
The stigma around seeking mental health support and social attitudes towards mental illness have meant that women, in particular, have inadequate access to the required help.
Hakini says about 75 per cent of its clients are women as they face more acute stigma than men when seeking in-person counselling.
“Some are not allowed by their brothers or husbands or family,” Ms Mleitat says.
Hakini serves clients mainly in Palestine but also has Arabic-speaking users from the UAE, Jordan, Germany, the Netherlands and the US.
Ranging in age from 18 to 45 years old, the platform’s users can opt for individual sessions or packages with an average price of $60.
Another option is paying $15 for a monthly subscription of guided self-help tools on a range of topics “to help them be their own therapist”.
The content and online sessions are in Arabic as part of efforts to address the gaps in mental health support and to offer culturally nuanced insights, says Ms Mleitat.
Hakini provided 40,000 minutes of online therapy in the 12 months from November last year to October 30, 2021.
It also served 1,000 people using its self-help tools and published 300 articles in Arabic on its platform that reached a million readers, it says.
The start-up is considering an expansion into the Mena region, starting with Saudi Arabia and Egypt, says Ms Mleitat.
Hakini, which previously raised $35,000 in pre-seed funding from investors in Dubai and Paris, is now seeking another $750,000 in seed investment, Ms Mleitat says.
It will use the funds to invest in technology, build a mobile app, hire more people and start marketing.
Running a start-up in Palestine is not without its challenges, says Ms Mleitat.
“In my experience, we do not have strong infrastructure for entrepreneurship. There is no independent ecosystem,” she says. “I see change coming from entrepreneurs because they can transform the economy.”
Palestinian start-ups require more investment, which is separate from international aid, to help entrepreneurs to solve local problems, Ms Mleitat says.
“There is a lot of funding coming into conflict zones but we need to enhance the mindset of investment into start-ups,” she says. “We are not looking for a donation; we are looking for investment in a business that will expand and build sustainable solutions.”