Phase 313 weeksSix intervention schools, six controls

The intervention

Weekly gameplay in six Addis Ababa high schools, run entirely inside the students' lunch break. delivered in thirteen weeks.

Weeks delivered

Intervention schools

Target students per session

15–30

Minutes of play per session

73.2%

Best school retention

40.6%

Lowest school retention

Operations

One school a day, five days a week

Scientific consistency required a fixed rotation. Every school got the same games in the same order in the same week, which meant the schedule had no slack in it at all.

Monday School 1
Tuesday School 2
Wednesday School 3
Thursday School 4
Friday School 5 and School 6

Game Masters assembled at the Creative Hub from 11:00. Supervisors checked materials and staffing before transit. Teams arrived 20 to 35 minutes ahead to set up a classroom, which bought an uninterrupted 15 to 30 minutes of actual play.

A first-day session in progress at one of the intervention schools — First-day sessions ran Beyaynetu Level 1 at every school — the fastest game in the set, chosen deliberately to open on energy.

Thirteen weeks

The behavioural arc

Phase A · Weeks 1–2

Initiation, and a visible knowledge gap

Phase B · Weeks 3–6

Emotional investment, and students teaching students

A weekly gameplay session mid-intervention — Mid-intervention sessions. By this point rule explanations were getting shorter every week.

Students playing around a table during a session — Mid-intervention sessions. By this point rule explanations were getting shorter every week.

Phase C · Weeks 7–10

Mastery, strategy, competitiveness and cheating

Phase D · Weeks 11–13

It reaches their plates

The final day of the intervention at one of the schools — Final sessions, week 13. Active gameplay was concluded exactly at thirteen weeks so students could focus on final examinations.

Qualitative analysis

Learning, and evidence of behavioural change

Indicators of mastery

Self-correction — at School 6, students caught their own mistakes and immediately recalled the right food group.
Peer instruction — at School 3, students explained the rules and the FBDG concepts to newcomers without any facilitator prompting.
Strategic reasoning — at School 2, avoiding street-food spaces in Digis to manage penalty risk.

Comprehension built cumulatively across the thirteen weeks, which cut both ways: students who missed foundational sessions visibly struggled and felt isolated when grouped with peers who had played continuously.

By weeks 12 and 13, unprompted

The games taught us about food, and I actually changed my own eating habits because of it.School 4

The games helped me understand how to organize my diet daily to live healthy.School 6

I want to focus on my meals more going forward.School 1

Closure · 6 July 2026

Handing it over

The closing event brought together the Ministry of Agriculture, EPHI, WUR, school directors and focal persons from all 12 schools — intervention and control — along with top-performing students and their families.

The stakeholder closing event with presentations about the project — Stakeholders were walked through the full evolution — from the adolescents' first sketches to the finished games.

The adults had to play

Some school directors and focal persons had never quite grasped why board games belonged in a school. So the event sat them down at the tables. Playing the games — and finding they demand real cognitive and nutritional focus — closed the understanding gap faster than any presentation had.

Top-scoring adolescents then took the stage to describe their own behavioural shifts. Unscripted, from the students themselves, in front of the people who decide whether this continues.

Sustainability by distribution

Physical game sets went to all 12 schools — control schools included, each package with full rules so those students can learn independently. Intervention students already have the mechanics mastered well enough to form clubs and teach their peers.

That is what converts a research instrument into a community asset: the games stay in the schools, and they no longer need a facilitator to be played.

Officials, focal persons and families playing the games at the closing event — Officials, focal persons and families at the tables. Top-performing students were formally awarded their prizes.

What's next

Scaling past the six schools

The final phase takes the methodology national through social media — framing healthy eating as a level-up, not a chore — and offers donors and institutional funders a validated, evaluation-backed model ready to scale.

TikTok

The hype engine

High-energy, trend-driven content aimed at the younger demographic — the same audience the games were designed for.

Instagram

The community hub

Young adults and parents. Lifestyle integration and community building rather than instruction.

The authority

Data-driven posts for policymakers and educators, establishing the scientific and institutional credibility of the approach.

A 30-day release in three phases

Days 30–21 · Spark curiosity Teaser videos with a deliberate small error in the artwork, so that corrections in the comments push reach.
Days 20–11 · Bust the myths Partnerships with nutrition creators showing that eating well is not expensive — the exact misconception the co-creation workshops uncovered.
Days 10–1 · Influencer launch Game streamers play on their own channels, with early-access codes for people who engage.

Inviting people in rather than lecturing them

Health advice on social media gets ignored because it arrives as a one-way instruction — the same failure mode the classroom lecture hit in Round 1 of co-creation. The campaign target is 25% of viewers actively engaging.

The tactics follow from that: posting a common unhealthy habit and asking which one people struggle with, using Instagram's "Add Yours" to collect real meals, and posing genuinely contested questions — who is responsible for teaching children about nutrition, the school or the parents?

Tracking focuses on shares as the measure of reach, and on the ratio of engagement to views.

Having deployed the validated game across thirteen weeks, we have handed the physical games to the schools for sustainable use and are launching a digital campaign to scale this nutritional impact nationwide. Project conclusion, July 2026

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