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 supported ARMMAN since 2021 with its mMitra programme and is now providing  grant support for its Kilkari and its Mobile Academy programs that leverage high telecom penetration in India to improve maternal and child health outcomes. 

Kilkari sends life-saving preventive health care information directly to the mobile phones of pregnant women and new mothers and their families while the Mobile Academy delivers mobile-based flexible, high-quality refresher training to ASHAs (frontline health workers). 

Falling under the aegis of the Ministry of Health and Family Welfare (MoHFW), they are the largest maternal and child mHealth programs in the world. ARMMAN and MoHFW are imple­menting these programmes through a co-invested partnership model.

Expected Social Impact

Netri Foundation’s grant will cover the personnel, technology, training, content, materiaIs, M&E, research and admin/overhead expenses for reaching 130,700 women via Kilkari and training 1,450 health workers via Mobile Academy in Haryana over a period of a year.