Social Issue

India has poor maternal and child health indicators; a woman dies in childbirth every 20 minutes and for every woman who dies, 20 more suffer lifelong ailments. 27 million children are born annually, two children under five die each minute, while four out of every 10 children are unable to realise their full potential due to chronic undernutrition or stunting. Tragically, much of this mortality and morbidity is preventable.

Lack of access to preventive care information is a key cause for the poor maternal morbidity and mortality numbers. High mobile penetration in India positions voice calls as an excellent mechanism for reaching women and families with this critical life-saving healthcare information in a timed and targeted manner using the principles of behaviour change communication.

Our Response

ARMMAN is an India-based non-profit leveraging mHealth to create cost-effective, scalable, solutions to improve the access of pregnant women and mothers to preventive information and services, as well as training health workers to reduce maternal and child mortality/morbidity.

Netri has provided ARMMAN a grant to support its mMitra programme, offering a free mobile voice call service that sends timed and targeted preventive care information weekly/bi-weekly directly to the phones of the enrolled women, through pregnancy and infancy phases, in their chosen language and timeslot.

mMitra has reached 2.3 million women and children through partnerships with 97 hospitals and 40 NGOs.

ARMMAN’s success with mMitra led to an invitation in 2019 by the Ministry of Health and Family Welfare to implement Kilkari, a mobile health education service (similar to mMitra) which has reached 18 million women and children in 13 states. mMitra will increasingly be used to test innovations that can then be rolled out in the Kilkari programme, with the focus on reducing high risk pregnancies, developing analytics to drive program efficiencies, and to create targeted programmes.

Netri has provided ARMMAN a grant to contribute to the mMitra programme over a one year period.

Expected Social Impact

A randomised cluster trial from 2013-2015 in Solapur, Washim, and Osmanabad, districts of Maharashtra, in which mMitra was one of two interventions evaluated for impact on behavioural change and health outcomes, verified the following:

• 25% increase in the number of pregnant women who took iron and folic acid tablets for 90 or more days
• 47.7% increase in proportion of women who knew at least three methods of family planning
• 26.3% increase in proportion of infants under six months who were exclusively breastfed 
• 17.4% increase in proportion of infants who tripled their birth weight within one year 

This grant provided by Netri is expected to allow mMitra to reach 5000 women during pregnancy and infancy.