Mobile Midwifery Delivers Health To Ghanaian Moms

One mobile phone app delivers time-sensitive text messages or voicemails to pregnant women and new mothers; the other is for nurses. Together they are doing wonders for maternal and pregnancy health care and raising community awareness at the same time.

Thirty-two-year-old Cecelia Annan wouldn't say she has an easy life; but she does have an easy pregnancy.  "In my previous two pregnancies, I felt sick and weak all the time," she says, shaking her head at her family's compound, with its wood-fired kitchen and mud-brick huts. "Before, I would drink alcohol and I took enemas." Her visiting nurse shows me the herb used for traditional medicine enemas thought to relieve cramping. She explains that they actually cause internal bleeding and miscarriage.

Now, Annan knows better. "I've had a lot of information from Mobile Midwife," she remarks. "Now I know what time to go to the clinic for my appointments and immunizations, and that I should go to the clinic when I am sick."

Eight months along, Annan plans to deliver in a clinic and she's already made arrangements with a local taxi service. "Now I eat fruit and vegetables, even if it's with a little [starchy] fufu," she says. "I feel stronger and more energetic than even before I was pregnant."...