Learn how Rahma Health delivers impact with purpose-led growth, community co-design and by harnessing lived experiences.
Rahma Health supports multicultural families globally through evidence-based health and parenting resources in Arabic and English. Founded by Dr Naba Alfayadh, the organisation helps parents bridge cultural and language gaps in the first five years of a child’s life.
Rahma Health is the 2025 Telstra Best of Business Awards Business of the Year, National Accelerating Women Winner and National Championing Health Winner.
As a leading example of small businesses driving positive change in Australia, Rahma Health’s story shows how community connection and co-design can help power small business growth.
When Dr Naba Alfayadh was pregnant with her daughter, she noticed a stark gap in health and parenting resources for multicultural families. English-language resources were plentiful and evidence-based, while resources for Arabic-speaking communities were scarce and outdated. Dr Naba describes how much she admired the resilience and motivation of those families – they were just not given the resources to support them on their journey.
As a native Arabic speaker, former refugee and mother, Naba saw the urgent need for trusted, culturally safe health information. Rahma Health was born to help fill that gap, with an approach built on co-designing resources with the community.
When it came to reaching more people, Naba focused on using the platforms her audience already use. She’s also grown the team with people who share lived experiences that help foster a strong understanding of community needs.
Many large health organisations produce high-quality, evidence-based resources. Key to the success of Rahma Health has been tapping into an unmet need, being community led and co-designing materials with its community.
The reason why our resources have been used 3 million times is because of that community co-design.
Dr Naba Alfayadh – Founder, Rahma Health
Every Rahma Health resource is created alongside its intended community audience. The team works with Arabic-speaking parents, medical professionals and cultural consultants to ensure the content reflects real needs, language and context.
Beyond the community it serves. Rahma Health has also fostered strong partnerships with the community in the healthcare industry. In fact, their partnership with the Raising Children Network (RCN) was a key turning point in their business journey.
The Raising Children Network has a wealth of world-class evidence-based content. RCN was visionary in how they approached collaboration with a community led organisation. They saw that communities trust resources that come from people with lived experience, so they licenced their content to Rahma Health for translation and cultural adaptation.
This vision paid off and joint resources have reached four hundred thousand people within Australia, with families commenting that these resources “feel like a warm hug” or “feel like they were created for [my community]”.
Rahma Health’s approach is an example of how co-design can help small businesses grow in any sector. Engaging with your audience early can help you build their requirements directly into your offering. It helps make it more likely people will actually use it.
Finding partners who share your values can also be a way to scale your collective reach for greater collective impact and to accelerate your joint momentum.
More than 90 percent of people discover Rahma Health through social media. The Rahma Health team prioritises social media as a key channel as it aligns with how the community connects.
The primary channels the team uses are:
It’s a deliberate strategy built on understanding how Arabic-speaking communities share information.
Social media is our superpower and one of our key strategic levers. It's how people in our communities engage with each other around the world, and it's where we have the most reach.
Dr Naba Alfayadh – Founder, Rahma Health
A parent in Melbourne can send a video to a family member in Baghdad, Hamburg or Beirut in seconds. That connected community helped Rahma Health become a global organisation from day one.
Knowing how your audience finds and consumes information is important for success. Sometimes it’s not the way you might think. Naba found that many parents don't even use Google to search anymore. They go straight to YouTube or TikTok.
Every leader should think about where their audiences find information and consume services. Social media can be a service delivery channel, not simply a marketing exercise. Staying curious and connected to the community you serve will help you notice behaviours and how they can change in ways you might not predict.
As Rahma Health's reach grew, so did the workload. Naba had been managing operations alongside her medical practice. The organisation needed dedicated support to keep up with demand.
Rahma's first full-time employee, Mohannad, was a refugee from Gaza. He initially started working with Rahma part-time alongside shifts at a meat factory. This meant waking at 3am for early starts, and these conditions affected his health.
I saw how awful the factory work was for Mohannad and his family. I wanted to give him more work, but I had never hired someone full-time before.
Dr Naba Alfayadh – Founder, Rahma Health
Driven by a strong purpose, Naba took a calculated risk to invest in building her team in a way that aligned with her values, the same values that drive Rahma Health.
Naba made the decision to bring Mohannad on full-time after analysing Rahma Health’s budgets and forecasts. The data gave her confidence that the hire was sustainable.
The decision transformed the organisation. In Gaza, Mohannad had been a CEO of a financial services company. He brought this operational experience to the team and helped implement strong processes to help the business shine.
The story of Rahma Health’s first hire is just one example of how Rahma Health stay connected to the community it works with and for.
For any business looking to grow, Naba’s experience offers a useful lesson. Building a team of people with similar experience and who share your purpose can create value that goes well beyond filling a role.
Explore how successful businesses live their purpose, inside and out.
For any business feeling stretched by growth, a structured moment of reflection can help reveal opportunities hiding in plain sight.
Naba credits the Telstra Best of Business Awards process with encouraging the team to reflect on the way they operate.
Their participation in the program prompted them to take important steps to:
Awards programs can also provide confidence, credibility and connections that can help you move your business forward.
After the awards, we've had so many partnership and funding opportunities come up. The awards have definitely given a lot of credibility to Rahma.
Dr Naba Alfayadh – Founder, Rahma Health
For purpose-led businesses, they can offer the space to rethink how you deliver social impact and learn from other business leaders.
Meeting other business leaders through the Telstra Best of Business Awards introduced Rahma Health to new tools. For example, they’ve adopted an AI video translation platform recommended to them by Dr Samantha Pillay and partnered with Knowby, an AI translation company who were also a finalist in the awards.
Learn more about AI for small businesses.
For Naba, growing Rahma Health carries important responsibility beyond her immediate impact as a practising medical doctor. It means reaching more families and improving more lives.
Rahma Health’s recognition as 2025 Telstra Best of Business Awards Business of the Year, National Accelerating Women Winner and National Championing Health Winner reflects the strength of that commitment.
If Rahma Health's story resonates with you, discover more about what makes award-winning businesses stand out.
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Nominations close 5pm AEST Tuesday, 28 July 2026.
