Using Impaxio’s Mobile Surveys to Scale Up Wellbeing in Kenya
Yoga4Kenya Project leveraging Impaxio’s mobile surveys to measure data-driven wellness
Written by Reuben Kyama, Nairobi. A version of this article appeared in the Kenyan Newspaper "The Star" on 15 May 2026.
From the heart of Brussels to the lecture halls of Kenyan colleges, one yoga teacher is proving that "inner peace" can be measured with digital precision.
In the high-pressure corridors of Kenya’s health colleges, a quiet revolution is taking place one breath and one text message at a time. Belgium-born yoga teacher Ann Schreppers is not just teaching students how to find their centre; she is measuring it.
Through a new mobile-based survey tool, developed by Impaxio, a Swiss-based provider of SMS marketing services, Schreppers is comparing student progress against control groups to prove that wellness is a measurable academic asset.
Since founding her project in 2019, the Belgium-born yoga teacher has turned her yoga mats into data points. Using Impaxio’s mobile surveys to track the mental well-being of health college students, she is bridging the gap between traditional wellness and professional academic outcomes.
With more than 10 years of teaching worldwide, she hopes to scientifically back-up the power of the practice as a tool for youth empowerment in the field of public health.
Mental health is increasingly becoming an important public health issue. As a result, yoga offers a practical intervention for chronic stress. By cultivating mind-body and breath awareness, it provides a powerful tool for preventing burnout and shifting healthcare toward a proactive, prevention-first model.
Impaxio was founded in 2020 by two senior researchers from the University of Zurich; Dr Michael Brander and Dr Matthias Huss realised the transformative power nested in SMS surveys while working on projects involving smallholder farmers in East Africa. In their conversations with the farmers, they learned first-hand how much farmers enjoyed engaging with SMS surveys.
The Impaxio co-founders say that “this interaction with the African farmers inspired us to come up with high-quality SMS surveys, monitoring and impact analysis accessible and affordable for everyone.”
For Schreppers, as she pioneers the Yoga Teacher Kenya Project, she is among those using the platform to follow up and optimise her students’ experience.
“Using Impaxio’s platform has been amazing,” she said, adding that initially she had to print the surveys and fill out everything manually, which was really a time-consuming task, but now she just needs to collect the contact numbers and set up the survey at once.
“And this happens automatically, and so we get all the data, which makes it really easy to compare the data of the main practice group and the control group,” she says.
Eventually, she says, the aim is to make this into a larger scientific study about yoga and its impact, specifically in building resilience and emotional intelligence to get larger numbers.
“This easy-to-use SMS survey tool really helps in terms of saving time and the ease of data analysis,” she adds.
“Actually, we relied more on SMS before but we’ve recently shifted towards WhatsApp, so it really depends on what the students have available; most of them now have smartphones, but before it was not the case.”
Her interest in yoga stemmed from personal struggles with health issues during her time at the university. Her low self-esteem during her studies led her to develop hypertension and stomach ulcers due to chronic stress, anxiety and perfectionism.
“I was emotionally unstable,” she recalls, adding that yoga helped her control her emotions, build resilience in body, mind and nervous system, and embody empowerment and self-esteem through breathing techniques and self-reflection and meditation.
It was this first-hand experience with emotional struggles that led Schreppers to seek a healthier, more balanced perspective on life. This, she found in yoga, while on an internship in Indonesia in 2014.
“Yoga came on my path during a leadership internship in Indonesia. I am now sharing with the youth what she wishes others had shared with her when struggling,” she said.
“It is not aimed to replace traditional therapy BUT can complement and reach more people as sessions can be done in groups - with personal attention- and immediately free space in the body which awakens new perspectives in the mind.”
She is now helping others find their footing by tracking their mental well-being using SMS and WhatsApp surveys. Schreppers has since amassed over 1,500 hours of yoga training and over 10 years of sharing the practice worldwide.
Her background in public policy, with a focus on sub-Saharan Africa, led her to reach out to 4Kenya Trust, an umbrella organisation of Kenya School for Integrated Medicine, based in Kwale County on the Kenyan coast.
“In Kenya, I have also done short programmes in some communities and offered sessions to NGOs, too.”
About 10% of college students in Kwale have enrolled in her yoga classes. These classes are offered through an intensive 10-day program. Students aged 18 to 30 years practice yoga techniques for 1 hour daily complemented with intensive seminars.
Jennifer Joseph, 29, one of the yoga students, hailed Impaxio’s SMS survey. “It has made it easy to interact with our yoga tutor, and to share our feedback.” she said.
Through seminars, students learn specific techniques such as posture, breathing and releasing stress. This way, individuals learn to develop skills that they may not have possessed from the start. This includes inculcating a sense of confidence, courage, and determination.
This, explains Schreppers, is the principle of neuroplasticity and embodiment : that you can do anything that you set your mind on.
“This is my biggest passion,” confesses Schreppers, who also has a background in ballet.
The Yoga4Kenya project is expanding by involving universities, and will now be known as The “Conscious Curriculum - embodied education”.
This is where the Impaxio platform becomes really useful, given that the project eventually aims to make this data collection a larger scientific study on the impact of yoga.
“So, this [the Impaxio platform] really facilitates [research], in terms of time and ease of data analysis,” she says.
Even so, Schreppers is cognizant of the limitations presented by this research method, since gathering data this way relies on self-reporting.
As a result, margins for human error are to be expected. All the same, these surveys have been a great start in measuring any increase in resilience among yoga students.
The surveys heavily relied on the SMS platform to gather data at the beginning of the project. However, WhatsApp is increasingly becoming the best method for this, now that more people in urban areas have access to smartphones. In rural areas in Kenya, smartphones are still not common.
Ends.
Further information about Ann Schreppers and Conscious Corner: