#momconnect

[babyforyousa-blog]

#MomConnect aims to support maternal health, the services are free to the user & messages are available in all 11 official languages - Dept of health SA #pregnant #maternalhealth

[praekeltfoundationblog]

It’s been a busy year – highlights from 2015 from Praekelt Foundation

As is often the case this time of year, the team at Praekelt Foundation has been spending the last few weeks reflecting on everything we’ve accomplished in 2015. We’re grateful for all of your support and encouragement over the last 12 months. Thanks to you and our committed and hardworking partners we’ve made great strides in our mission to use technology improve the lives of people living in the developing world.

Maternal health at scale

The National Department of Health’s MomConnect platform is now serving over 700,000 pregnant women in South Africa in more than 95% of clinics across the country. Thanks to our collaborators USAID, Johnson and Johnson, MAMA, Baby Center, ELMA Foundation, HISP and Jembi Health Systems, hundreds of thousands of women who are preparing to give birth in 2016 have the power to improve their health in the palm of their hands.

Connecting youth across the globe

With every year that passes, our youth engagement platform continues to grow and mature. In 2015, we worked with the National Department of Health and WitsRHI in South Africa to launch B-Wise. With the support of the UNFPA and Ford Foundation, we launched Tune Me in Zambia and Malawi. With Girl Effect, we’ve launched mobisites for vulnerable girls in more than 30 countries in over 15 languages. Through our youth platforms, we deliver essential information to young people, equipping them with the knowledge they need to make healthier choices, support from their fellow users and links to vital services.

Accelerating access for millions

Just last month we announced a partnership with Facebook to create an incubator programme that will provide 100 social change organisations with the tools and support they need to build online services for feature phones in low-bandwidth environments. Already, more than 10 million users have visited the sites we’ve created for UNICEF, MAMA, Malaria No More and Girl Effect on the Free Basics by Facebook, but with the incubator, and the tools we’ll develop with our friends at Torchbox, we’ll expand the range of life-enhancing services available to millions more.

Unlocking the power mobile messaging

Since 2012, Praekelt Foundation’s mobile messaging platform, Vumi, has been used to send more than 100 million messages to over 10 million people. This year, with the support of UNICEF Innovation, we’re amplifying the reach and impact of Vumi with a new project codenamed Junebug. Junebug is a messaging gateway which connects governments, NGOs and enterprises to local mobile network infrastructure, allowing them to send and receive millions of mobile messages faster and more efficiently than ever before.

A time for new beginnings

We’re immensely proud of what we’ve achieved this year and in the history of our organisation. Over the last 5 years, Praekelt Foundation has grown from a team of seven people working mostly in Johannesburg, to an organisation of over 40 people working in 6 offices across 4 continents. Next year is set to be a landmark year and we’re excited to be sharing some new developments in early 2016.

[praekeltfoundationblog]

B-Wise and MomConnect Celebrate!

We’re excited to share that today saw the launch of B-wise!, a mobisite that puts the most important aspects of their health and wellbeing at the fingertips of millions of young South Africans.

The launch of B-wise! was announced by Health Minister Dr Aaron Motsoaledi at a special ceremony in Shoshanguve hosted by the National Department of Health (NDoH). It was also a chance to celebrate the the one-year anniversary of MomConnect, an NDOH project focused on improving care for pregnant women and their infants.

B-Wise! – whose name came out of a national competition – provides the country’s youth with the information, tools and support they need to live healthier lives. Under the slogan ‘Health at your fingertips’ the mobisite gives young people an opportunity to access health information on various topics such as sexual and reproductive health, mental health and substance abuse. In a demonstration of one of the key aspects of B-wise!, Dr Motsoaledi took part in a live chat with young people who are now able to register and connect with health and wellbeing experts on a regular basis.  

Both B-Wise! and MomConnect are NDoH projects that are positively impacting the lives of millions of South Africans, demonstrating how the department is taking the lead in mHealth – not just in Africa, but across the globe. We’re proud to be the technology provider for both of these groundbreaking platforms that superbly demonstrate the impact and potential of mobile to improve people's lives.

Almost exactly a year ago, we launched MomConnect, a nationwide NDoH programme designed to improve the quality of care for pregnant women and their infants.  MomConnect grew out of MAMA, a global public/private partnership aimed at delivering critical health information to women living in poverty. A year ago, MAMA was integrated into the MomConnect programme that also links women with the national pregnancy registry and enables real-time feedback about health services received and data connected to a woman’s health record. To date, over 500 000 pregnant mothers registered to receive messages through SMS according to the term of pregnancy up to a year after delivery. A key aspect of MomConnect is that it enables feedback around service delivery. The NDoH has responded to over 180 000 messages to the helpdesk, the majority of which are questions around maternal and child care.

Now comes B-wise! which is the official NDoH’s Adolescent and Youth programme, and another example of a Praekelt Foundation platform reaching national scale. B-wise! has its roots in Young Africa Live (YAL), which Praekelt Foundation launched in 2009 as a way of engaging young people about sex, HIV/AIDS, rape and gender issues in a lively, engaging and informative mobile web format. Over five years, YAL has been used by close to 2-million unique users in South Africa, with 56% of those aged 16-25.

“We’re absolutely thrilled that YAL has grown into B-wise! and is now being taken to scale through a national campaign spearheaded by our partners at the NDoH,” says Gustav Praekelt, founder and chairman of the Africa-based Praekelt Group.

“When we started YAL, we always hoped it would become part of an inclusive platform that ensures not just scale, but scale with real impact. Working with our partners, we’ve used YAL as a step-off to B-wise! It’s a mobile environment poised to effect sustainable change in the way that South African youths deals with their health and wellbeing.

“We have already seen how MAMA was able to integrate into MomConnect – and so become part of a bigger ecosystem that not only empowers expectant and new mothers by delivering and collecting information, but also integrates with the public health system. Both of these are great examples of how our open-source, global infrastructure can work with supply systems – like those at the NDoH – to improve the health and wellbeing of people in need.”

B-Wise! is built around a partnership between ourselves, the NDoH and Wits Reproductive Health and HIV Institute (WitsRHI). Partnerships with MTN and CellC allow for their customers to access the site completely free of charge. We expect partnerships with other Mobile Network Operators to follow.

B-Wise! is the latest step in our commitment to developing population-scale digital platforms that improve the lives and wellbeing of millions.

[therakyatpost]

New Post has been published on The Rakyat Post

New Post has been published on http://www.therakyatpost.com/world/2014/08/22/south-africa-launches-app-expectant-mothers/

South Africa launches App for expectant mothers

PRETORIA, Aug 22, 2014:

A new cellphone-based application, MomConnect, is expected to register all pregnant women in South Africa for an SMS service which provides information and advice on pregnancy, as well as a channel to notify the department about poor service.

Health Minister Dr Aaron Motsoaledi, who launched MomConnect at the Soshanguve Multipurpose Community Centre, about 25 kilometres north of here, on Thursday, said the messages would advise them on what to do at any stage of their pregnancy and also encourage women to start ante-natal care at an early stage.

“We will say ‘Mom, since you registered with us you are now 13-weeks pregnant. This is what you must do, this is where you must go and this is what you must avoid’,” the minister explained.

“Even after the birth of the baby, we will continue to send the messages for the period of one year. The messages will include advice on the baby; ‘This is what you must do, this is what the baby must get (vaccines)’.”

Motsoaledi said pregnant mothers would also be able to send messages to the Department of Health and complain or compliment the services received at healthcare facilities.

“In a particular period, we will be able to know from here in Pretoria that in the past six months that most of the messages that are bad were coming from a particular clinic.

“We will know something is happening at that clinic because many pregnant women are complaining.”

In preparation for the launch of MomConnect, the department, with the help of development partners, trained 10,300 health workers nationally to assist pregnant women to register for the service.

“In the coming weeks, every health facility in the country will have at least one person who is trained and whose job will be to assist and register pregnant women,” the minister said.

The project will be funded for the next two years by various partners, including the United States government with 49 million Rand (about RM14.64 million) and Johnson & Johnson with R5 million.

The country will only start funding the project from its fiscus after the next two years.

Four cellphone operators — Vodacom, MTN, Cell C and Telkom — are offering a 50% discount on the SMS that would be sent to pregnant mothers.

[praekeltfoundationblog]

Praekelt Mobile Technology Powers Groundbreaking South African Department of Health Maternal Health Service

August 21, 2014 -- Praekelt Foundation is one of the key technology partners in MomConnect, a groundbreaking Department of Health (DoH) mHealth initiative.

Praekelt Foundation, together with Jembi Health Systems, provided the project architecture and process flow for the nationwide programme designed to improve the quality of care for pregnant women and their infants.

Launched by the Minister of Health, Dr. Aaron Motsoaledi, on August 21st in Soshanguve outside Pretoria, MomConnect incorporates three key elements: a pregnancy registry, stage-based messaging and a helpdesk for mothers.

The USSD-based registration system being used in the MomConnect project runs on Praekelt Foundation’s open source, cloud-based platform, Vumi. The platform connects with all four South African mobile operators, ensuring that registered pregnant women receive stage-based, culturally sensitive SMSs in their language of choice. The programme is modelled on world-leaders in maternal health content, BabyCenter’s methodology of delivering personalised, culturally sensitive, stage- based content at the right time of pregnancy – and, after birth, during the first year of their child’s life.

The MomConnect Help Desk allows pregnant women and new mothers the ability to rate the service they received at public health facilities in South Africa. It also allows women to send a question, compliment or complaint and to search through USSD-based life guides with key snippets of information about pregnancy, delivery, HIV, feeding and much more.

For the August 21st launch, MomConnect will allow pregnant South Africans to sign up for SMSs in any one of six languages (English, Afrikaans, Zulu, Xhosa, Sotho and seTswana) with all 11 official languages expected to be available soon. The built-in flexibility of Vumi also means that users can re-register with a new mobile number should they need to and that they can opt-out from MomConnect should they miscarry or lose their baby. As part of MomConnect’s focus on data capturing for optimum planning by the Department of Health, a survey will capture a user’s reasons for leaving the programme.

“We are really proud to be part of this nationwide programme that has the potential to impact the Millennium Development Goals and the Post 2015 agenda of reducing child mortality and improving maternal health,” says Praekelt Group’s CEO, Gustav Praekelt.

“It has been gratifying to build on the work that we have been doing with MAMA over the past three years, in this important private-public partnership with the National Department of Health,” adds Praekelt. “Praekelt Foundation’s vision is built on using mobile technology to improve the lives of those living in the majority world – and MomConnect is a manifestation of this.”

With support from Johnson & Johnson and USAID, Praekelt Foundation (the country partner for MAMA) has played an important role in the creation of MomConnect. Since it launched in South Africa in 2012, Praekelt Foundation has provided the platform for MAMA South Africa – and, working together with the Wits Reproductive Health and HIV Institute and BabyCenter, has helped to create and deliver twice-weekly tailored messages for pregnant women, based on where they are in their pregnancy or their child’s age. These have now been combined with the National Department of Health’s messages to form the resource that MomConnect will draw on when communicating with pregnant women and mothers of infants.

MAMA South Africa will play a complementary role to MomConnect with an increased focus on interactive, community platforms, such as the MAMA mobi site (askmama.mobi); the MAMA Mxit platform and the MAMA Quiz Platform. “More than 90% of MAMA South Africa’s 450 000 users engage with these channels, which additionally allow for users to interact with a community of pregnant women and moms of infants,” explains Praekelt. “We are thrilled that the MAMA SMS model was able to be scaled up and migrated into MomConnect and Praekelt Foundation will continue to work with our MAMA partners on our other platforms to play our part in reaching Millennium goals 4 and 5.”

Praekelt Foundation’s technology works together with Jembi Health Systems, which houses the official pregnancy registration information at the National Department of Health. MomConnect’s use of the Vumi platform means that the programme has the potential to reach every single mom in South Africa. Without relying on smartphone technology or internet-enabled devices, USSD is a technology that works on every phone in the country. In addition, the reverse-billing being contributed by the four major mobile service providers (MTN, Vodacom, Cell C and Telkom Mobile), together with additional funding from Johnson & Johnson, means that all registered MomConnect users will receive stage-based messages via SMS for free.

Alongside its role as MomConnect technical implementing partner, Praekelt Foundation’s design studio created all the marketing and training material for the programme, including posters, flyers, and the opt-in booklet (available at launch, in three languages).

“MomConnect is really a life-changing programme that’s based on the most ubiquitous piece of technology in Africa: the mobile phone,” concludes Praekelt.

[praekeltfoundationblog]

Praekelt Foundation’s Poster Child for Preventing Mother-Child HIV Transmission

Praekelt Foundation has been working with partners in rural KwaZulu-Natal to pull off an audacious project that seeks to track expectant mothers’ health, with the ultimate goal of reducing mother-child HIV transmission.  Can it be done? Yes, believes the Foundation.  Via SMS.  And they have the poster to prove it.

MoMConnect is a pilot project being implemented collaboratively between the Foundation and technology partner Virtual Purple, supported by UNICEF South Africa with the full commitment of the KwaZulu-Natal regional Department of Health.  MoMConnect aims to prove the power of SMS by testing the efficacy of personalised, unique antenatal and postnatal SMS reminders to 6,000 pregnant women in two districts of KwaZulu-Natal, namely Umgungundlovu and Ethekwini.  MoMConnect has been a work in progress for 18 months.

Praekelt Foundation and Virtual Purple have built an integration between the Foundation’s SMS messaging system, called TxtAlert, and Virtual Purple's medical records system, VEMR, which system has been rolled out to 51 clinics and hospitals in the pilot regions.  The technological integration enables the sending of informational and reminder SMS messages, linked to the mother’s gestational status or baby’s health, captured via VEMR.    SMS messages are delivered in isiZulu, Sesotho or English, according to the mother’s preference at opt-in to the MoMConnect programme.

MoMConnect debuted at South Africa’s premier AIDS conference towards the end of June this year, the 6th SA AIDS Conference.   Along with UNICEF and the Health Systems Trust, Virtual Purple and Praekelt Foundation hosted an exhibition stand that enabled live demos of the MoMConnect SMS subscription process, and presented an academic poster in the formal poster presentation session, which complemented a talk by Otty Mhlongo, KwaZulu-Natal Health department’s  Deputy Manager for Prevention of Mother to Child Transmission (PMTCT) in a satellite PMTCT session.  The poster was entitled “Challenges and Lessons Learnt in setting up and using Mobile Technology to address Gaps in the Continuum of Care towards meeting the Goals of EMTCT”.  

Dr Sanjana Bhardwaj, UNICEF South Africa’s Chief of Health and Nutrition and a key driver of MoMConnect, said that both Otty’s talk and the poster were well received by colleagues and participants alike: “This project is unique; people are eager to understand how it works and to see if it will meaningfully contribute to government’s goal of virtually eliminating new HIV infections in children by 2015.”

Matthew de Gale, Praekelt Foundation program manager says, “We’ve spent 18 difficult months rolling out the project, fine-tuning the SMS messaging protocols, overcoming technological and operational challenges, and finding solutions to the capacity issues that healthcare workers experience at the frontline.  The SA AIDS Conference gave us the opportunity to take a step back and reflect on what we have accomplished so far.”

The SA AIDS conference coincides with a turning point in MoMConnect’s progress.  The teething problems seem to largely be over, and the project is running smoothly.  Will there be future challenges for MoMConnect?  Given the size and context of the project, no doubt there will.  But one thing is certain:  Praekelt Foundation, along with Virtual Purple, UNICEF and the KwaZulu-Natal Department of Health, is adamant that they will prove behavior change and HIV reduction through the power of SMS.