While progress in maternal and child survival has been made, this has not been enough to achieve the Millennium Development Goals 4 & 5. Even though maternal mortality has declined dramatically, the situation is still worrying specifically in Sub-Saharan Africa, where an African woman’s risk of dying from pregnancy-related causes is a 100 times higher than that of a woman in a developed country. Similar progress has been achieved in MDG4, but nevertheless, almost 3 million of all the babies who die each year can be saved with low-tech, low-cost care.

The GSMA mHealth team held a webinar this week on “How to maximise the Impact of mHealth services for maternal and child health.” Almost 100 people joined the webinar, and together with distinguished speakers:

• Judy Njogu: Product Manager for eHealth & eLearning at Safaricom
• George Held: VP of Commerce at Etisalat
• Alice Lin Fabiano: Senior Program Officer and Advisor to Johnson & Johnson Corporate Contributions
• Joanne Stevens: consultant to MAMA South Africa

… we covered various questions within 4 key drivers:

1. Reduce fragmentation:
   1. Safaricom’s engagement with development industry and government to support existing health interventions and leverage efforts through mobile;
   2. Etisalat’s view on partnership development and working with governments; and
   3. MAMA’s collaboration with local and international public and private partners to avoid duplication and fragmentation of services.
2. Deliver scale:
   1. Etisalat’s integration of mobile money into the Mobile Baby service;
   2. J&J’s perspective regarding the shift in funding appetite away from smaller proof-of-concept projects to multi-party initiatives involving public and private sector stakeholders; and
   3. Safaricom’s vertical integration of mobile money, health, education and other areas driving adoption.
3. Replication across other disease portfolios and countries:
   1. J&J’s view on services as a benchmark or best practice for further investment and replication of services to other countries; and
   2. Etisalat’s key drivers when replicating the Mobile Baby services.
4. Alignment of the value proposition for health and mobile:
   1. MAMA’s view on incentivising the mobile and private sector for longterm investment;
   2. Safaricom’s and Etisalat’s view on how best NGOs, civil society and health organisations should be engaging with mobile and private sector; and
   3. J&J’s insight into a shared value proposition.

Key messages from the discussion:

• Reducing fragmentation requires partnership development and strong engagement and support from governments;
• Supporting scale is key to driving a critical adoption by customers;
• There are a number of best practices emerging that can help companies and organisations replicate in shorter time periods; and
• The issue of a shared value proposition needs to be driven by all stakeholders early in the planning phase of any project.

View the recording of the webinar below and download a copy of the slides.

For more information on the Pan African mHealth Initiative and National Repositories of Information, please contact us on [email protected]. For information on various mHealth initiatives, click here. For more information on GSMA mHealth resources, click here.