SEESALT Terra · Kigali and Rwamagana, Rwanda

A card game that gets young people talking about what nobody says out loud.

Rwandan young people can recite the facts about HIV. They will not say the word in a room. Guhuza is 108 cards built for that gap — no electricity, no internet, no clinician.

~330Participants in the July 2025 pilot

40Decks placed with four institutions

108Cards across four content domains

3Partners asking us to come back

Pilot figures as reported by the project team, July 2025.

What actually blocks care

The barrier is not what people know. It is what happens when they ask.

Health education in Rwanda has largely won the information battle. Young people can name the transmission routes and the testing intervals. What stops them walking into a clinic is social: the cost of being seen to need it.

A game changes who is responsible for the awkwardness. The cards carry it instead of the player, which gives someone a reason to say a difficult word in front of their peers — and a script for what happens next.

The timing matters. PEPFAR financed 37.7 per cent of Rwanda's HIV response and is withdrawing. What survives that has to run without a budget line: on paper, in an ordinary classroom, led by someone who already lives there.

July 2025

Forty decks, four institutions, and nobody flown in to run them.

Roughly 330 participants across Kigali and Rwamagana. Rwandan student leaders facilitated every session. When travel risk rose we moved delivery forward a month; when scale started to strain the sessions we wrote sign-in and role-assignment procedures mid-pilot rather than after it.

Partners kept their decks and asked us to come back. That is the finding that reorganised the project: the scarce input is trained facilitation, not cards.

Content was co-designed with Partners In Health staff, a Rwandan development consultant, and faculty at the Middlebury Institute of International Studies. Production was funded by a $10,000 Projects for Peace grant.

African Leadership University~300 undergraduates. Validated the facilitation mechanic; now supplies trained student facilitators. Its ULove mental-health club has asked for a mental-health module.
Agahozo-Shalom Youth Village~30 students at a residential secondary school enrolling 500+ orphaned and vulnerable young people drawn from all 30 Rwandan districts.
Partners In Health RwandaCo-designed the clinical content of the first module.
Africa EduDistribution partner for the pilot placement.

How it works

Co-design the content, train local facilitators, hand over the deck, leave.

The toolkit is designed to be abandoned by us. A deck that needs us present is a deck that stops working the moment funding does.

1 · Co-designContent built with clinical staff, a Rwandan consultant and academic partners before a single card is printed.

2 · TrainLocal student leaders are trained to facilitate. No outside staff run sessions.

3 · PlayThree to six players per deck, dozens of sessions per deck, no power or connectivity required.

4 · StayPartners keep the decks and the procedures, and run sessions on their own schedule.

What is in the box

108 cards across four content domains
A 20-page facilitator's guide
Session procedures for sign-in and role assignment, written during the pilot rather than before it

One architecture, many topics

HIV is the first module. Mental health is next — symptom recognition, help-seeking, and the stigma attached to both. ULove, the mental-health club at African Leadership University, asked for it directly.

The structure does not change when the subject does. That is the reason to build a deck rather than a campaign: the second topic costs a content cycle, not a new product.

Who runs it

Directed from New Haven and New York, delivered entirely in Rwanda.

Zhijun He — Co-DirectorMA candidate in African Studies at Yale. Partnerships and policy engagement.
Xinyue Wen — Co-DirectorPhD student at the Columbia School of Social Work. Product, grounded in her research on spatial inequality and population health.
Esther Kwizera UrindwaLocalisation. English–Kinyarwanda translation of every card.
Lisa AkamanziOperations, and the Rwandan entity now being structured.
Cynthia Umugwaneza, Vanessa Munyana and EricFacilitation and outreach.

$7–8

Modelled landed cost of one deck in Rwanda at a 500-unit run, including EAC tariffs — around $4 ex-factory. One deck serves three to six players across dozens of sessions, which puts material cost per participant in cents.

Guhuza is pre-revenue. These are modelled unit economics at volume, not realised ones. Product development is already amortised: the Projects for Peace grant covered content adaptation, artwork, the facilitator's guide and the first 50 decks.

Revenue is planned in three tiers — a print-ready licence with facilitator training, finished decks, and co-branded editions for NGOs. Decks are a one-time purchase; training, new modules and content updates recur.

What's next

Turning three partners who want more sessions into three partners who can buy them.

Guhuza is applying to the Yale Tsai CITY Fall 2026 Venture Development Program, for both the Launch Pad and the Accelerator.

The immediate work is the part a pilot cannot settle. We have demand we cannot yet transact against: no Rwandan entity that can invoice the institutions already asking, and no price we have actually tested. Registering locally or finding a fiscal host comes first, then paid pilots with the partners in hand.

Running alongside that is a second edition of the deck, with its own mechanics and artwork, and a scoring design adapted for questions that have no right answer.

If you work on adolescent health, stigma reduction or youth programming in East Africa and want to talk, write to us through SEESALT.

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