African Women Find Antenatal & Pregnancy Care At Their Fingertips


06/08/2018

At an affordable price, GiftedMom strives to end preventable deaths of infants and mothers in Africa with a mobile phone app.


Dailycsr.com – 08 June 2018 – GiftedMom is a mobile health service provider which has collaborated with “Business Call to Action” for expanding its service over “three new African countries”, in an attempt to save mothers and infants from “preventable death” during pregnancy and delivery.
 
GiftedMom is an amalgam of innovation in healthcare which brings the doctor in the reach of “pregnant women and nursing mothers” in Cameroon with the help of mobile phones. It also provides healthcare message to its users of smartphone app through online articles and SMS. With the aim of improving anti-natal care of “500,000 pregnant women”, GiftedMom has plans of spread across “Nigeria, Côte d’Ivoire, and Kenya”.
 
Moreover, it also has a goal of improving the “vaccination turnout of 700 000 children” besides improving accessibility to healthcare services for its “500,000 users” by the year of 2020. The programme was launched in 2008 and since then it has had an aim of accelerating “progress towards the Sustainable Development Goals”.
 
In this journey, the service has challenged companies to promote and develop “inclusive business models” which reach out to people who have the purchasing ability of below “US$10 per day”. As statistic suggests, daily around “800 pregnant women die”, while the mortality rates of infants falling prey to “preventable diseases on an annual scale is “around 1.5 million infant”. In Cameroon alone, maternal deaths occur in “596 per 100,000 live births” and “60 per 1000 live births” of infants pay with their lives.
 
However, with improved “antenatal care and information, vaccinations or timely health advice”, most of these situations could be avoided, as pregnant women and nursing mothers who live in developing countries often seek healthcare very late , while their “remote locations” too are responsible for the delay. At GiftedMom, daily “communication tool” like mobile phones is turned into healthcare service which reduces the distance between medical help and “low-income African women”.
 
According to “Business Call to Action”, in short BCtA:
“Expectant and nursing mothers can sign-up for the phone service with a one-off subscription fee of less than a dollar or download the smartphone application from Google Playstore. Using SMS messages, the innovative automated SMS and voice messaging platform automatically reminds users of antenatal appointments, provide vaccination alerts, advice on health risks and complications, as well as information on family planning and breastfeeding”.
 
In the words of the Chief Executive of GiftedMom, Alain Nteff:
“Our service brings health to the fingertips of African women using popular and affordable mobile phone technology. Since the beginning of our trial in 2014, we now check in on around 110,000 pregnant women and mothers in rural and urban Cameroon. The health advice we provide has increased antenatal turnout to 80 per cent and vaccination turnout to 90 per cent in some medical centres we work with”.
 
While the Head of BCtA, Paula Pelaez added:
“Award-winning health service and innovator, GiftedMom, demonstrates that technology can be used creatively to make a positive social impact in developing countries improving health and gender equity”.
 
 
References:
3blmedia.com