OneHope · Leadership training for Africa · 2023

They asked for a website to share PDFs. Their readers paid for every megabyte.

A website for OneHope’s Called to Thrive program, for leaders who mentor entrepreneurs and young leaders across Africa: built for the reader’s phone, connection, and data bill, in English and then French.

Year: 2023
Sector: Nonprofit, leadership training
Role: Discovery, design, and build, then running the site
Engagement: A project in two phases
Team: Duncan Platt, with Daniel Hall’s team at OneHope
Closest service today: Delivery

A young woman leaning on a schoolyard wall in a rural town, reading a Called to Thrive module on her phone, a notebook open beside her

a full page, fonts and all, measured: 122 KB
of that loaded once, then reused on every page after: 81 KB
languages, with French added for Francophone Africa: 2

What they asked

We need a website for our PDFs.

OneHope trains leaders around the world, and had always done it in print. Its Called to Thrive program equips leaders who mentor entrepreneurs and young leaders across Africa.

COVID hit Africa hard. Printing stopped, supply chains broke, and visits to villages ended. In our first call, OneHope’s US team asked for a website where readers could download the training as PDFs.

What was really going on

Context changes everything.

Duncan grew up in South Africa, and we had worked across Africa and the developing world. So we knew in the first conversation what a website alone would miss. The readers were in Central and North Africa, where mobile connections are unreliable, and most would be on EDGE, GPRS, or 2G at best.

And every megabyte cost money. In the Democratic Republic of the Congo in 2023, a gigabyte of mobile data took about ten times the share of income it did in the US. For an average American, that would be like paying $61 for a gigabyte, and 24 to 37 cents to download one lesson as a PDF.

A website was the right start. The real problem was cost and reliability: every page had to be small enough to load on a slow connection, and cheap enough to be worth loading.

The call

Make it small, and still make it beautiful.

The easy answer was the one they asked for: upload the PDFs and link to them. Instead the site itself became the training, with the PDFs as a download for anyone who wanted one. Every page had to load quickly on a slow connection and cost the reader almost nothing. And it still had to look good. Readers on a basic phone deserved a well-made experience, not a stripped-down one.

The trade-off: no video, PDFs as a fallback rather than the main event, and a design built from a handful of images, vectors, and fonts.

What we did

Design for the reader’s phone.

OneHope knew the content and the readers. We knew the conditions, and designed every page around them.

Start from the reader
We designed for an entry-level phone on a slow, pay-as-you-go connection, not a laptop at head office.
Count every kilobyte
Images and vectors made as small as they could be, lean stylesheets, and fonts cut down to only the characters the pages use, served from the site itself.
Load once, reuse everywhere
The fonts, styles, and scripts load with the first page and are reused on every page after, so each new page costs a fraction of the first.
Serve it from Africa
Internet routes across Africa are notoriously unreliable, and every trip to a server in the US crosses more of them. So the site was served from Cloudflare’s locations in Africa, close to the readers.
Add French
In March 2023 a second phase brought the site to Francophone Africa.

The role

Duncan Platt led the work in 2023, from the first call to launch, with Daniel Hall, OneHope’s Director of Digital Program Development. We designed and built the site, then ran and updated it for OneHope.

The work

Small enough to cost almost nothing.

Each download, priced at DR Congo’s 2023 share of income in American terms, about $61 a gigabyte. One lesson as a PDF cost up to 37 cents, and a typical web page about 13. A page of ours cost less than a cent.

A page of the Called to Thrive site122 KB · less than a cent
A typical mobile web page, 20232.2 MB · about 13 cents
One lesson as a PDF4–6 MB · 24 to 37 cents

Drawn to scale, with the PDF at the middle of its range. Sources: our 2023 performance test of the site; the median mobile page in October 2023, from the HTTP Archive’s Web Almanac; data prices from Cable.co.uk and incomes from the World Bank, 2023.

What changed

A full page in 122 KB.

A full page of the site, fonts and all, weighed 122 KB and loaded in 11 requests. Two-thirds of that was fonts and scripts, loaded once and then reused, so every page after the first cost far less.

From March 2023, readers could reach the training in French as well as English.

Afterwards

We ran it, and OneHope came back.

After launch we kept the site running and up to date.

In 2024 OneHope came back to us for Forever Open, an app for pilgrims at the 2025 Jubilee in Rome.

Who carried it forward

We did. We ran and updated the site for OneHope until they rebuilt it.

In their words

At OneHope, working with Duncan and BoldOrion felt like having someone on our team who understood both the technical challenge and the heart of the mission. Duncan brought real quality to the work, spotted problems we might otherwise have missed, and was the person I trusted when something complicated needed solving. He didn’t just build what we asked for, he helped us make it better.