Mobile Aide Against Maternal and Infant Mortality

Inspiration

Nigeria is reported to have the fourth highest maternal mortality ratio in the world. One of the major contributing factors being the lack of information on the importance of care, illiteracy, common negative socio-cultural practices and the importance of access to health facilities with skilled medical professionals. Specifically, many women depend on relatives or friends to provide pregnancy and infant health related information, without taking into account the uniqueness of their pregnancy or newborn.

What it does

MAAMI, our maternal health literacy mobile solution, aims to serve as a platform for expectant and new mothers in underserved communities to access prompt, relevant and customised language‐based information on birth preparedness, complication readiness and post‐natal support. Our solution will provide free voice messages to users, providing government approved health and nutritional information. The messages are personalised to the user's stage of pregnancy or parenthood, and is customised to their local language. These messages, designed to run from the tenth week of pregnancy until the new baby turns one are expected to enable women and families make more informed decisions about their health and future, thereby reducing avoidable deaths due to childbirth.

How we built it

We are building this System using a web framework Django based on the python programming language. The sms feature was implemented with help of a Telecom API, owned by AfricaTalking. Also our system was made asynchronous with help of Celery Python Library. We will employ these same features for the voice integration

Challenges we ran into:

We encountered few challenges as we developed this system. Firstly, we had issues finding a good and affordable Telecommunications Api . There Were compatibility issues between the libraries used and the current python version.

Accomplishments that we're proud of:

We are happy and proud that over a thousand users have benefited from our platform, which only delivers text message. We look forward to rolling out our voice messages in Nigerian local languages to further meet the demands of rural dwellers who cannot read or write