Africa Health Agencies net Grants to Improve Women’s and Children’s Health Using Mobile Technology

Malaria No More Malaria No More is a nonprofit organization determined to help the world reach the global goal of near zero malaria deaths in Africa. With this in mind, Malaria No More helped develop and implement NightWatch, a malaria communications platform that uses celebrity voices to reach vulnerable populations through SMS text messaging, television, radio and music. NightWatch has attracted participation from Africa’s biggest stars, support from international private-sector partners, and endorsement from the Ministry of Health in each country of engagement, helping to save lives and empower families to take action in the global fight against malaria. Building on successful pilots in Senegal and Cameroon and thorough research on behavior change theory, Malaria No More plans to expand the NightWatch platform in Tanzania. Malaria No More will record celebrity voice messages to be sent to mobile subscribers; produce regular, interactive activations through regional radio stations to encourage mobile engagement; and initiate a targeted SMS campaign with mobile partner Zantel.
Praekelt Foundation Praekelt Foundation builds open source, scalable mobile solutions that aim to improve the wellbeing of people living in poverty in South Africa. One example is working with a program funded by the Mobile Alliance for Maternal Action (MAMA) to provide a mobile-based SMS service for mothers and mothers-to-be with high quality, locally relevant, week-by-week information on pregnancy and infant care. The service will tie into a dynamic community portal with social networking features, additional SMS messaging, and interactive quizzes. This grant will support the development of additional features to significantly grow the user base (notably a live chat feature permitting real-time engagement with experts and counselors), an expanded SMS program to more quickly reach the lowest income mothers, and additional monitoring and evaluation sites to generate evidence on real health outcomes. MAMA aims to reach one million mothers and household decision makers in South Africa over three years, with appropriate and ethical advertising supporting the bulk of ongoing maintenance costs.
Medic Mobile Medic Mobile develops technologies to leverage low-cost mobile platforms and connect people at every level of the health system—from clinicians to community health workers to patients – working with more than 30 international and local partners across 16 countries in Africa, Asia, North America, and South America. In partnership with DMF India and Stanford University, Medic Mobile will implement a two-year, multistage plan to leverage mobile infrastructure to send automated, timely, patient-centric SMS reminders for vaccinations in India. While some regions have experienced relative success in improving complete vaccination rates by one year of life, the national average remains a dismal 36.3%. Recent work by Medic Mobile demonstrates that an automated, text message-based immunization reminder system may positively impact these statistics and decrease the incidence of vaccine-preventable disease. The first year will consist of a randomized controlled trial to evaluate a refined reminder system in the context of integrated healthcare networks, and the second year operational scale-up will distribute service through multiple cities and districts in India while determining best practices for continuous improvement, cost-effectiveness, and sustainability.
Society for Elimination of Rural Poverty The Society for Elimination of Rural Poverty (SERP) is a governmental institution that supports women’s self-help groups (with over 11 million members) and their federations in Andhra Pradesh, India as part of a multi-dimensional poverty alleviation strategy.  SERP’s Community Managed Health and Nutrition work is anchored at the village-level through self-help group appointed community health workers that oversee nutrition day care centers (NDCC). In a Public-Private Partnership with Bluefrog Technologies Pvt. Limited as the software solution provider, SERP has piloted a real time Decision Support System called mNDCC to ensure consistency and quality of services provided through the NDCC. mNDCC will also be used to generate a monitoring and evaluation feedback loop between local and state level actors and to generate client-wise tracking of nutrition and health behavior change. The reach of the mNDCC program will expand as SERP continues to scale the NDCC program to all 38,000 villages in the state.
VillageReach VillageReach is a nonprofit social enterprise that extends the reach of health services to remote, underserved communities by creating dynamic delivery and information monitoring systems. Despite improvements over the past five years, mortality rates in Malawi remain among the worst in the world. Underlying causes of children’s and women’s poor health include unavailability of timely information, delayed care-seeking, and compromised access to quality health services among rural and impoverished communities. To address these barriers, VillageReach has been piloting a toll-free hotline to improve case management of maternal and child health and increase uptake of community-accessed and facility-based services in rural areas, providing direct access to information, advice, and health promotion regarding maternal, neonatal, and child health. This service will be expanded to additional districts in order to reach more individuals with lifesaving advice and to build the evidence base supporting the impact and cost-effectiveness of the service in preparation for a national scale-up.