NextBillion - A WDI Publication

In 2013, I co-founded Light of Hope, an education company that runs an after-school programme for children aged 4-12 in Bangladesh. We built creativity workshops, moral education curricula and learning experiences for children who struggled in a rote-learning school system. The programmes worked reasonably well, but we kept hitting the same wall: Children arrived at age 4 already behind, not academically but developmentally. They lacked the curiosity, the emotional vocabulary, and the basic capacity to handle frustration and keep trying. As the Harvard Center on the Developing Child explains, these foundations are built through the everyday “serve and return” interactions between a child and their caregivers in the first years of life. By the time a child reached us, that critical early window had largely passed.

That realisation made us rethink everything. My co-founders and I saw that, if we wanted children to arrive at school ready to learn, we had to reach them earlier, which meant supporting their parents from the time of the child’s birth. To help meet that need, in 2016 we founded ToguMogu, an AI-powered digital parenting platform in Bangladesh that has reached more than 476,000 registered users over the past six years, at parenting stages ranging from pregnancy through age 10. Alongside its AI assistant, it connects parents to a network of experts, including paediatricians available through teleconsultation and a community of hundreds of thousands of other parents, while also offering growth tracking, expert-reviewed content and other services. 

Light of Hope and ToguMogu were not separate ideas. They emerged from the same insight: that a child’s development is continuous and starts at birth. We simply applied that insight to two different stages of childhood: the early years from 0-5, and the primary school years from 4-12.

After nearly a decade of building services for parents navigating both of these stages of childhood, we’ve developed a clear view of where parenting technology is failing families, not just in Bangladesh but globally. Despite being worth hundreds of millions of dollars and growing at double-digit rates, the parenting technology industry has three structural blind spots that are getting more serious the faster the sector grows. These blind spots exist in wealthy and emerging markets alike, but their consequences are most severe in low- and middle-income countries where families have the fewest options for child development specialists or other alternative professionals to turn to.

The First Blind Spot: Parenting Apps Are Built for Mothers, Not Families

Walk through the onboarding flow of almost any parenting app and you will notice something immediately: The language, the content and the community features assume one user, the mother. This reflects a real imbalance in caregiving, where mothers worldwide perform 2.5 times more unpaid care work than fathers. But by designing only for mothers, these platforms reinforce that imbalance rather than helping to close it.

Research from developed markets reveals how this gender bias is often built into popular parenting apps, as shown in a 2021 study of digital parenting guidance in Canada. This design choice not only reduces the chances of fathers getting involved, it also often gives mothers the added responsibility of “curating” digital parenting guidance for their partners — a dynamic that doesn’t serve the interests of either parent (or their children).

We saw this pattern in our own platform and set out to change it. Of ToguMogu’s nearly half a million registered users, over 164,000 are men, roughly 35% of our user base. We deliberately designed the app to include fathers, framing them as active participants in a shared parenting journey instead of secondary observers of the mothers. Once we designed for fathers, they showed up.

This matters far beyond app design. When fathers are engaged and supported in early parenting, children do measurably better. Research on parenting programmes indicates that engaging fathers, not mothers alone, improves both the effectiveness of the programme and the outcomes for the child. A parenting platform that engages the whole family is not just being inclusive; it is investing in better developmental outcomes for the child, which is the entire point.

The Second Blind Spot: The Age-Five Cliff

Parenting apps tend to be heavily concentrated on children’s early years. This focus is well founded: Around 90% of a child’s brain development happens before age 5, and early connections lay the groundwork for later cognitive ability. But treating age 5 as a finish line is a mistake.

Development does not stop when a child starts school. Research on middle childhood, which spans the ages of 6-12, often describes this period as the “forgotten years,” since it is overlooked by most education research despite being a time of rich cognitive, social and emotional growth. Middle childhood is when children consolidate learning habits, self-regulation and social skills, yet it is precisely the stage at which most parenting apps disengage from the family.

When a child enters school, the parenting technology sector largely hands the family over to the education technology sector. Some edtech tools connect to families through school-to-parent messaging and home engagement features, but that is a different job from supporting a parent in the developmental work of raising a 7-year-old at home: managing big emotions, building independence, and navigating a child’s first real social conflicts. Currently, few tools serve that need, which leaves parents of primary-school-aged children with less support than they had when their child was an infant.

At ToguMogu, our usage data showed that families did not stop seeking guidance once their child started formal school; questions simply shifted from topics like feeding and sleep, to issues like behaviour, learning and schooling. In response, we expanded ToguMogu to serve children up to age 10, adapting our content and expert network in recognition of the fact that guidance for ages 0-5 does not transfer neatly to the school years. However, the broader sector has largely not made that realisation, and families in emerging markets, where school systems are least able to fill the gap, pay the price.

The Third Blind Spot: AI Without Accountability

As the head of a digital platform that integrates artificial intelligence into its service delivery, I’m familiar with both the upsides and downsides of the widespread incorporation of AI into parenting apps. ToguMogu’s AI assistant provides parents with insights based on their child’s developmental progress, and I have seen firsthand how useful this can be, and how easily it can go wrong. UNICEF’s guidance for child-centred AI calls for regulatory oversight, safety, fairness, transparency, explainability and accountability. Yet no consistent standard, either regulator- or industry-led, holds parenting tools to those principles, even when they leverage AI to offer developmental assessments, behavioural guidance and health recommendations for children — areas where the wrong advice can have significant negative consequences.

The risk is real, and it is particularly relevant in the Global South. Studies show that while parenting programs are generally successful in improving children’s behaviour, their effectiveness may not be easily replicated in low- and middle-income countries, where ignoring unique cultural contexts can worsen existing inequalities and cause harm. The difference between developed and emerging countries here is cultural, not technological: Many parenting interventions in the Global North are based on values like individuality and independence, which run contrary to the collectivism, emotional restraint and joint-family child-rearing that characterise parenting across South Asia and other emerging regions. A tool that treats one culture’s parenting norms as universal therefore risks judging another culture’s practices as deficient. That’s why parenting technologies must be tested locally, built on local data and kept under human oversight: As research has found, this sort of deep local adaptation yields better results than surface-level changes, like simply translating an interface from one language to another.

Education technology already offers a cautionary tale. UNESCO has warned that generative AI is advancing faster than national regulation and that many educational institutions remain unprepared to validate the tools they adopt. Parenting platforms risk repeating that pattern with even higher stakes. The children affected include infants and preschoolers, and in many emerging markets, families have no clinician, health visitor or specialist to turn to for a second opinion when an app gets it wrong. The app may be the only source of guidance available.

What Funders and Development Organisations Should Do

Over a decade of building ToguMogu and Light of Hope, we have fallen prey to each of these three blind spots ourselves, and we know they are fixable. But they will not fix themselves. The funders, governments and development organisations that support and partner with these platforms should put their leverage to use to advocate for the following changes.

Require father-inclusive design as a condition of support: Any platform receiving development funding or an institutional partnership for early childhood outcomes should have to show active engagement from fathers and co-parents, not just mothers. Measure it. Fund it. Expect it.

Fund the 5-8 window deliberately. The move into school should not be a drop-off point in support. Development organisations working on education should actively seek out and back platforms that bridge parenting technology and school-age support. That infrastructure barely exists today, and it needs to be built.

Set accountability standards for AI in early childhood before a crisis forces them. Funders and institutional partners should require, at a minimum, that AI-driven parenting tools disclose the make-up of their training data, undergo independent clinical validation before deployment, and tell parents clearly when guidance is AI-generated rather than reviewed by a clinician. The sector will not do this quickly on its own. External pressure is what will move it.

None of this requires punishing innovation or demanding costly trials for every feature. It requires that the organisations funding this sector attach basic expectations to their support. The families using these platforms in low- and middle-income countries are not beta testers. For many, a parenting app is the closest thing to professional early childhood guidance they will ever receive. That responsibility deserves more care than the sector currently brings to it. At ToguMogu, partners, including the United Nations Population Fund and Bangladesh’s Directorate General of Family Planning, have pushed us toward higher standards than we would have set alone. That kind of institutional pressure works. The development community should apply it far more widely.

Zillul Karim is Co-Founder and Strategic Advisor at ToguMogu, and serves as Board Director at Light of Hope Limited.

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