MomConnect is an initiative of the South African National Department of Health produced by the

Praekelt Foundation Praekelt.org is an African nonprofit organization dedicated to using mobile technology to improve the lives of people living in poverty. It was founded in 2007 as an offshoot of Praekelt Consulting. Notable projects that the organization is invo ...

. It uses cell phone based technology to support maternal health. It is available in all the 11 official South African languages. NurseConnect is a related project for maternity staff. It is the only nationally scaled

mHealth mHealth (also written as m-health or mhealth) is an abbreviation for mobile health, a term used for the practice of medicine and public health supported by mobile devices. The term is most commonly used in reference to using mobile communicatio ...

platform in

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. It was launched by

Aaron Motsoaledi Pakishe Aaron Motsoaledi (born 7 August 1958, in Transvaal, now Limpopo) is the Minister of Home Affairs in the Cabinet of South Africa. He was previously the Minister of Health from 2009 to 2019. He was a MEC in Limpopo province for agriculture ...

in August 2014. More than 900,000 pregnant women signed up for weekly texts by December 2016. A specialist

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service was started in 2017. The weekly SMS messages continue until the baby's first birthday. Pregnancies can be easily and quickly registered in the public health system using the system. The calls are free. Nearly 2 million pregnant women and new mothers have used it. From December 2017, it was made available on

WhatsApp WhatsApp (also called WhatsApp Messenger) is an internationally available freeware, cross-platform, centralized instant messaging (IM) and voice-over-IP (VoIP) service owned by American company Meta Platforms (formerly Facebook). It allows use ...

which allows richer and real-time interaction and makes delivery of personal messages more secure and affordable. The Helpdesk makes use of

machine learning Machine learning (ML) is a field of inquiry devoted to understanding and building methods that 'learn', that is, methods that leverage data to improve performance on some set of tasks. It is seen as a part of artificial intelligence. Machine ...

to help operators address frequently asked questions. The

’s built-in location-based services enables users to see their nearest clinics. In its first five years it had over 2.7 million users, about 80% of pregnancies within the public sector. The helpdesk receives between 1000 and 7000 messages a day.

References

{{reflist Healthcare in South Africa Health care software