GSMA mWomen awards Innovation Fund grant to Grameen Foundation

The GSMA mWomen team is pleased to announce that Grameen Foundation is the latest recipient of an Innovation Fund grant. Grameen Foundation joins Accion International and the Self-Employed Women’s Association (SEWA) as the third NGO to be awarded a grant to develop a mobile offering for low-income women.

Grameen Foundation has long recognised the importance of mobile in the fight against global poverty.  Starting with the Village Phone programme in 2003 (adapted from the original programme in Bangladesh), the foundation has become a leader in developing mobile-based solutions that address the needs of the poor.

In 2010, Grameen Foundation worked with the Ghana Health Service and Columbia University’s Mailman School of Public Health to launch the Mobile Technology for Community Health (MOTECH) initiative.  Funded by an initial grant from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation and subsequent grants from USAID and the United Nations Foundation Innovations Working Group, the project focuses on using mobile phones to increase the quantity and quality of prenatal and neonatal care in rural Ghana, with a goal of improving health outcomes for mothers and their newborns.

The MOTECH initiative comprises two elements:

  1. “Mobile Midwife” service: this enables pregnant women and their families to receive SMS or voice messages that provide targeted, time-specific information about their pregnancy each week in their own language.
  2. Nurses’ Application: this helps Community Health Workers to record and track the care delivered to women and newborns in their area.

The GSMA mWomen Innovation Fund grant will enable Grameen Foundation to expand its mHealth work to Nigeria, a country with high rates of both maternal and infant mortality. It plans to localise the “Mobile Midwife” content for Nigeria and translate it into three to four local languages. In addition, it will study the price elasticity of demand for the service by testing multiple price points for the service across different customer demographics.

Grameen Foundation and the GSMA mWomen team aim to develop a sustainable business model for this service that is both priced in a way that is accessible to the poor and commercially viable to offer in the Nigerian market.

Photo: Courtesy of Grameen Foundation.

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