Impacc–Makapads — understanding a social enterprise from the inside out

Context

Makapads makes biodegradable sanitary pads from papyrus and recycled paper, manufactured locally in Uganda and sterilised using the sun's UV light. Sold through village shops at a lower price point than corporate competitors, they're designed to be accessible to rural communities — and to keep girls in school year-round by removing menstrual hygiene as a barrier to attendance.

Impacc, the impact accelerator backing Makapads, needed to build a digital scaling platform to help the venture grow. Before any technology decisions could be made, a discovery research phase was needed: what do the people who run Makapads actually experience day-to-day? What are the real friction points, and what does a good system need to do for them?

I led four rapid research sprints across production, quality assurance, administration, and sales — conducting in-person interviews and on-site observation at the production house in Kawempe and across Kampala.

Research approach

The methodology was built for speed without losing depth. Four sprints over three days, each following the same cycle: plan, observe and interview, document user needs as structured stories, map the end-to-end experience including emotional state, channels used, pain points, and what drives behaviour.

FIG. 01 — In-person interview session, Kampala

Production & quality assurance

The production house visit was the most grounding part of the research. Making Makapads is a hands-on, largely manual process — papyrus is pulped, pressed into sheets, cut, and sun-sterilised before packaging. Workers are paid by output, not by contract, which creates both motivation and precarity.

FIG. 02 — Show & Tell: shadowing the full production process, Kawempe production house

The data infrastructure matched the manual nature of the work: nothing was digital. Production demands came through phone calls. Records were kept in notebooks. Batch quality was checked by eye. Attendance was tracked on paper sheets that made it impossible to spot patterns across time.

Three needs dominated this area: a single consolidated place for production records, remote reporting without requiring a trip to Kampala, and structured attendance tracking that surfaces patterns over time rather than requiring manual cross-referencing.

Sales

Sales emerged as the most emotionally charged area of the research. The sales team operated with almost no infrastructure: all records in personal notebooks, all field reports written manually and submitted for approval — a process that took up to two days and often resulted in rejection and rewrites because there was no standard template.

The stakes were also personal. A team member's bag was stolen — and with it every customer contact, every sales record, and the list of stores stocking Makapads. There was no backup.

The sales reporting cycle had five visible stages — memo drafting, approval, CEO response, field recording, and report writing — each generating friction without a shared template, shared data system, or clear approval SLA. Users wanted to capture sales in the field, not retrospectively at a laptop.

Communication channels

Across all four service areas, I gathered data on how people chose to communicate — and why. The results were consistent: phone dominated, with 60% preference, driven by the need for dynamic, real-time dialogue on tasks that felt urgent, unfamiliar, or emotionally weighty.

The channel choice mapped clearly to task type. When something felt urgent, unfamiliar, or emotionally loaded — a quality issue, a delayed approval, a challenging field encounter — people called. When it felt simple, optional, or familiar, they'd text. Email barely featured.

FIG. 03 — Observations: trends and patterns across all research sprints

UX principles for the scaling platform

User needs and the emotional texture of their current experiences translated directly into UX principles to guide the Impacc platform design. The mapping was deliberate: every principle is grounded in something real that came up in the field, not assumed from outside.

Franchise model insights

A key research question for the CEO interview was how Makapads imagines its franchise model — the mechanism for scaling beyond Kampala without the parent organisation bearing all operational risk. The vision was clear: a full replica of the current operation (factory, office, sales team, system) in a new geography, operating independently but aligned to the Makapads mission and quality standard.

Outcome

The four research sprints produced a grounded discovery report covering all service areas of the Makapads operation — the first time the team's actual day-to-day experience had been documented in structured form. The findings fed directly into the Impacc platform design process, giving the product team a clear set of UX principles, user needs, and high-priority pain points to address.

The research also surfaced a critical risk the team hadn't articulated clearly: the complete absence of data redundancy. All records — sales, customers, production batches, training history — lived in personal notebooks or phone memories. The stolen-bag incident was a near-miss that exposed a systemic vulnerability, and it became the most compelling argument for moving to a structured digital system as a first priority.