Supporting 400K urgent foster care needs

Empowering families with features designed to ease urgent demands, simplify processes, and ensure families feel supported.

Role

Lead Product Designer

Industry

Social services

Duration

3 months

Lead designer & researcher (solo project)

Snapshots of app designs shown on mobile devices

Guiding families through complexity

Bringing guidance, support, and resources into one trusted place helps foster parents manage documents and navigate the system with more confidence. By cutting through the administrative noise, families can focus on what really matters, the children in their care. This work also aimed to simplify scattered processes while keeping sensitive family information secure and accessible.

Families were navigating chaos without support

Foster parents often step in with love but little preparation. Processes are unclear, paperwork is scattered, and deadlines are easy to miss. Social workers in South Africa manage up to 150 cases each, far beyond the ideal, leaving many families without the support they need. Drawing from my own experience as a foster parent, and speaking with others, I uncovered the key pain points around paperwork, deadlines, and communication.

Guiding families through complexity

Families were navigating chaos without support

Digital whiteboard with sticky notes, key points, and summaries.

Designing with empathy to reduce overwhelm

I designed a tool to reduce overwhelm and give foster parents more confidence navigating the system. Empathy guided the approach with clear, easy-to-understand language. Research and observation ensured the experience addressed real needs.

A central hub for clarity and guidance

The product vision centered on clarity, consistency and support:

A single hub for documents and key records
Clear next steps for each stage of the foster process
A space that offers support in what can feel like a very lonely journey

Together, these elements create calm and direction where there was confusion, helping foster parents feel more confident and in control. Features are prioritised to address the most urgent, high-impact needs surfaced in research while remaining technically feasible for an MVP.

A small solution for a big need

While still a concept project, the need is urgent:

12M children live in poverty in South Africa
2.7M are orphaned
300,000 in the Western Cape lack one or both parents
Social workers handle 150 cases each (vs 40–60 ideal)
400,000 foster care orders once needed urgent renewal

Clarity matters more than noise

This project is driven by personal experience and insight into the challenges foster families face. It focuses on designing scalable solutions that support families and ease pressure on social workers.