Spreading out information about Happy Baby pilot project and knowledge on baby wearing benefits in Nkokonjeru requires a well-structured mobilization with the help of recommended community members. Meetings started with the hospital where doctors and nurses showed a great interest and where Happy Baby is now invited to present the baby carriers and baby wearing benefits posters on immunization days, when parents from both nearby and remote villages come with their babies.

With the recommendations from the town council, leaders of all 12 villages are invited to hear about Happy Baby and to get permission and support on reaching out to parents in their villages. These leaders are then connected with mobilizers in each village, who are assigned to move from house to house to identify the first Happy Baby Ambassadors – selected families to receive the first Happy Baby Carriers and baby wearing benefits education.

The first Happy Baby Ambassador, identified by old wise women in the community, is the Katongole family, consisting of a mother, a father and two daughters – parents having a variety of occupations including teaching, gardening, cleaning and learning hair dressing.

Katongole family is currently followed everyday to monitor the usage of the carrier with both of their kids - at the age of 2 years and 1.5 months. Being a respected and good example family in the community, their photos are taken to be in posters and instruction guides of Happy Baby. As the first Happy Baby Ambassadors, Mr. and Mrs. Katongole use every opportunity to talk about the benefits of baby carrying, while the kids enjoy being bonded with their parents.

During the final refinement phase of Happy Baby Carrier, we have been busy with developing the templates which can be used by tailors to replicate carriers fast and easily. The first tailor to use these templates and produce our carriers is Selahattin Usta. He has the task to make 20 carriers which we will take to Uganda and distribute to our initial users, whom we call: Happy Baby Ambassadors.

As an experienced tailor, Selahattin Usta could easily understand the ‘how to make’ guideline and use the templates to make about 5 carriers per day: much faster than us!

After returning from Uganda, we have been developing the Happy Baby carrier with the help of families volunteering to be test users. We met baby Rebecca when she was only a month old and she was brave enough to try out the first prototypes of Happy Baby! During the past months, Rebecca and her family was visited several times as the design has evolved with their feedback.

“It has been exciting to follow the design process and test the different prototypes. It has made me very happy to think that Rebecca and I might be in a small way helping parents in Uganda and other countries connect to and safely carry their babies,” says mother Jade.

As we continued the design, we decided to give Rebecca and her family our final baby carrier model along with the ‘Happy Baby Experience Kit.’ During the past weeks, Jade has been sending us photos of their experience and feedback on the long-term usage of the carrier. Rebecca is now five months old and she can be carried both in the front and on the back.

“Rebecca likes to be close to us and observe the world around her from her higher vantage point. It is soothing for her to be carried and she happily will take a nap while in the baby carrier,” adds Jade, as Rebecca looks at me with curious eyes.

It has been a very exciting and an emotional process to follow Rebecca grow up reaping the benefits of being close to her parents, facilitated by the carrier we made with our own hands:)