Midwives Connect – Afghanistan

Despite foundational gains over the past decade, Afghanistan’s maternal mortality rate remains among the world’s highest, accounting for over five percent of all annual maternal deaths across the globe. Neonatal mortality remains equally abysmal. Midwives are at the heart of stabilizing maternal and newborn health outcomes in remote Afghan communities, but remain structurally under-resourced and overstretched at one midwife per 10,000 child-bearing age women; effectiveness is further hindered by lack of connectivity, support and supervision from implementing NGOs and public health officials. Our solution, Midwives Connect, combines a technology and service delivery approach to empower and oversee Afghan midwives saving lives at birth through an Interactive Voice Response (IVR) system that calls midwives on mobile phones each day to confirm locations; patients seen; deliveries performed, maternal&newborn fatalities; causes of each; and narrative feedback, questions, and requests for assistance. It also provides realtime connectivity with supervisors back at the provincial midwifery school, who would collect, visualize and review information, monitor performance, encourage patient referral, and aggregate data for submission to Afghanistan’s Ministry of Public Health (MoPH). Midwives Connect is based upon lessons learned from prior maternal health interventions in eastern Afghanistan and has strong local buy-in from midwives, supervisors at the midwifery school testbed, and MoPH officials. Midwives Connect is open-source; aligned with MoPH’s priority health interventions and M&E framework, and designed for sustainable transition-to-scale across provincial midwifery programs and integration into Afghanistan’s national health connectivity strategy.