Zero Mothers Die (ZMD) was fortunate to be presented at the health innovation congress of Barcelona, Healthio, where the focus was on connecting patients and health systems with the latest innovations in healthcare. The Zero Mothers Die co-founders, Dr. Véronique Thouvenot and Dr. Jordi Serrano Pons, together with the Global Program Manager, Jeannine Lemaire, presented the ZMD project and the ZMD App at the three-day event, receiving much interest and positive feedback from attendees.

We look forward to attending Healthio 2018!

Zero Mothers Die is very happy to announce that we are partnering with the Gambo General Rural Hospital of Ethiopia on a project to localize the Zero Mothers Die App for the Oromia region of Ethiopia, which will involve the translation and adaptation of the content into Afaan Oromo by medical staff, specifically those involved in maternal, newborn and child health programs of the hospital.

​The Gambo Hospital is a District Hospital participating in all National Programs and World Health Organization Programs including  Integrated Management and Neonatal and Childhood Illness (IMNCI), Integrated Management of Pregnancy and Antenatal Care (IMPAC), EPI (Expanded Program of Immunization), Therapeutic Feeding Centre for Severe Acute Malnutrition (TFC for SAM), Tuberculosis and Leprosy control, HIV prevention and diagnosis (being one of the permanent Sentinel Surveillance points for the national surveillance system), ART (Antiretroviral Therapy) and PMTCT (Prevention of Mother To Child transmission) services. Gambo Hospital has a catchment area of 458,112 people.

The content localization process is underway and we look forward to launching the ZMD Ethiopia App in 2018.

If you are an organization interested in deploying a tailored version of the ZMD App for your country or region, send us a message! 

We're delighted to announce that Zero Mothers DIe is partnering with the National Institute of Health of Women, Children and Adolescents Fernandes Figueira of the Fundação Oswaldo Cruz, an institution of the Ministry of Health of Brazil, to co-develop the Zero Mothers Die App for Brazil.

This will be carried out through a specific three-year research project called: 

Zero Mothers Die project: building bases for the pregnant E-patient at the National Institute of Women, Children and Adolescents Health Fernandes Figueira

Zerando a Mortalidade Materna: construção de bases para a E-paciente gestante no Instituto Nacional de Saúde da Mulher, da Criança e do Adolescente Fernandes Figueira

to evaluate the use and impact of the ZMD App on pregnant women and midwives in local communities of Brazil. Field surveys, interviews and data collection will help to evaluate the app.

Details of the Research Project:

This research project by the National Institute of Women's, Children's and Adolescents' Health Fernandes Figueira aims to translate and adapt the Zero Mothers Die mobile application to the Portuguese language with the participation of institutional actors. As well, we will listen to mothers and pregnant users of the service about the usefulness and the potentiality of this tool in its daily life. As methodology, we will use the technique of ethnographic research called participant observation in the phase of translation of the platform by health professionals. Afterwards, we will conduct semi-structured interviews in groups with users of the health service. Our expected results are the dissemination of the methodology used for peers in scientific publication and the provision of the application for pregnant women and mothers in general.

Our Zero Mothers Die co-Founder, Coumba Touré, was very fortunate to meet with Sri Mata Amritanandamayi Devi, known around the world as “Amma, the Mother of All.” As a spiritual leader, humanitarian and visionary, Amma has served the world-community for decades, imparting wisdom, strength and inspiration. 

Truly a citizen of the world, Mata Amritanandamayi holds free public programs throughout India, Europe, the United States and Australia, as well Japan, Sri Lanka, Singapore, Malaysia, Canada, Africa and South America. In her talks, she offers words of wisdom and guidance on both personal fulfillment as well as the most pressing matters of our time. From climate change to terrorism, crosscultural tensions to poverty and women's rights, Amma's observations invite each of us to get involved in the process of rebuilding a concerned and caring society.


About Amma:

To this day, Mata Amritanandamayi concludes her programs by embracing each person attending the event. Far from a brief book-signing or walk along the rope line, these personal, one-on-one meetings take up the vast majority of Amma's time. Amma has given this motherly embrace, known as her darshan, to more than 33 million people throughout the world. She has been known to give darshan for more than 22 hours without interruption.

The most personally accessible spiritual leader alive today, Mata Amritanandamayi may well be on a first-name basis with more people than anyone else in the world. When people pour out their hearts to Amma, she offers them emotional solace, spiritual guidance, and concrete solutions to their problems. Receiving Amma's embrace, many feel inspired to offer selfless service to those in need. In this way, this simple yet powerful act as a mother's embrace - has become both catalyst and symbol for the growing international network of humanitarian initiatives that is Embracing the World.


To find out more about Amma's important spiritual work, visit:

• http://www.amritapuri.org
• http://www.embracingtheworld.org

Eleanor Goldberg has written an exciting article as Impact Editor for The Huffington Post about a new commitment from two major companies to provide 100 million women with mobile technology over the next five years!
​

Best of all, Eleanor Goldberg highlights Zero Mothers Die as one of the like-minded organizations that believes in the potential of mobile phones for empowering women, which has led to our development of a mobile health initiative to deploy technology solutions directly to pregnant women in developing countries to help them gain access to critical healthy pregnancy and childbirth information.
​

We highly recommend reading the full article directly on Huffington Post Impact and let us know in the comments what you think about the potential of this initiative!

100 Million Women In Developing Countries To Receive Free Cell Phones | Huffington Post Impact

@ESGoldberg
​@HuffPostImpact

Bacterial infections around the time of childbirth are among the leading causes of maternal mortality worldwide and account for about one-tenth of the global burden of maternal death. Apart from death, women who experience peripartum infections are prone to severe morbidity and long-term disabilities such as chronic pelvic pain, fallopian tube blockage, and secondary infertility. Maternal infections before or during childbirth are associated with an estimated 1 million newborn deaths annually. This brief presents highlights of the recommendations including policy and program implications for translating the guidelines into action at the country level.


​Publication details 
Number of pages: 6
Publication date: September 2015
Languages: English
WHO reference number: WHO/RHR/15.19 - WHO/MCA/ 15.01​

Downloads

• Download highlights and key messages
• WHO recommendations for prevention and treatment of maternal peripartum infections
  
  

This Way Up is the forum for leadership growth and collaboration where CEOs come to tackle relevant, pressing and difficult  business issues across industries.

This year, Zero Mothers Die was invited on 16 June in Barcelona, for a presentation during the Trending Topic Talk on eHealth  (Agenda: http://thiswayup.eu/agenda/).

With an attendance of more than 300 CEOs from various sectors, including banking, insurances, informatics and electronics (http://thiswayup.eu/attendees-2015/ , http://thiswayup.eu/speakers-2015/ ), the Forum proved to be a dynamic and creative event.

eHealth raised important interest thanks to the demonstrations of: 

• Innovative neuro-electrics solutions by Ana Maiques (http://thiswayup.eu/news/?ehealth-trending-topic-participant-featured-in-stephen-hawking-s-science-of-the-future)
  
• Universal Doctor (www.universaldoctor.com) a medical translation application to improve multilingual communication between medical practitioners and foreign patients
• SOLVO Biotechnology (http://www.solvobiotech.com) a wearable technology to enhance monitoring of physiological performance

• the eHealth evolving global environment by Dr Yunkap Kwankam
  
• and the Mum’s Phone and Safe Birth Kit of Zero Mothers Die and Traffina Foundation in Nigeria (http://www.millennia2015.org/Save_Our_Mothers, and https://www.indiegogo.com/projects/zero-mothers-die-mobile-phones-for-pregnant-women#/story) illustrated in the photo above.
  

Lisa Darsch set a constructive Q/A session where the speakers (http://thiswayup.eu/sessions-2015/) and the participants engaged an open dialogue for future contacts and collaborations.

Zero Mothers Die received impressive support and warmly thanks the organizers and participants for their kind appreciation and help to connect to new national and international donors.

Fashion  4 Development (F4D) is an international private sector platform that supports the United Nations Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) and "Every Woman, Every Child", a UN Initiative spearheaded by the Secretary General Ban Ki-Moon.

Its mission is to harness the power of the fashion and beauty industries and implement creative strategies for sustainable economic growth, wellness and independence of communities worldwide and the preservation of culture through the expression of fashion.



Zero Mothers Die is featured on F4D's website and F4D TV channel (above) as a key global initiative to tackle maternal and child mortality using technology!

http://www.f4dtv.com/global-initiatives/zero-mothers-die/

“Increasing impact through innovation” was the central topic of the 7th annual ICT4D Conference that the non-profit organization Catholic Relief Services (CRS) held in Chicago, IL, from the 27th to the 29th of May, 2015. Representatives from government, academia, the telecom, software and banking industries, and development and non-profit organizations got together to share lessons and promote initiatives that use information and communication technologies to improve agricultural and emergency response practices, build capacity, and increase access to healthcare and financial services among disadvantaged populations around the world.

Despite the diversity of topics covered over more than 100 sessions, the unifying thread of “impact and results” brought about recurrent discussions among the participants on best practices to implement monitoring, evaluation, accountability and learning (MEAL) procedures in ICT4D programs, and other factors necessary to implement sustainable solutions built for scale. The conference underscored the key role that public-private partnerships and local champions play in achieving these goals, as well as ways in which integrating innovation on M&E, remote sensing, data management and data visualization software can improve decision making.

In the area of e/mHealth, a conference highlight was the keynote presentation of Dr. Alain Labrique, Director of the Johns Hopkins University Global mHealth Initiative. Dr. Labrique explored the value of mobile connectivity for the continuity of care, stressing the ability of these technologies to compress time, connect people and create windows of opportunity, providing new ways to tackle persistent healthcare problems. He defined mHealth as a “health systems catalyst” that helps bring effective interventions to scale, increasing their coverage and overall impact. If we overcome the urge to “reinvent the wheel”, he noted, mHealth solutions that target patients, providers and the healthcare system can fill identified gaps and help “optimize what we know works”. Dr. Labrique pointed out that successful mHealth projects for maternal health are being integrated into national programs, as is the case of MAMA in South Africa.

The conference also included presentations on MomConnect, the national pregnancy registry system in South Africa, which uses cellphone SMS technology; D-Tree’s Safer Deliveries mHealth referral and emergency care project in Zanzibar that seeks to increase maternal use of healthcare facilities; and a pilot project implemented by RCRA in Uganda that combines the use of mobile phone applications with radio and TV messages to register, monitor, refer and educate women throughout their pregnancy and even after labor. Securing funds, however, remains an issue for the sustainability of some of these initiatives.

As Senior Advisor in ICT Applications for the WeObservatory, I had the pleasure of representing the Millennia2025 Foundation and Zero Mothers Die in the Fostering Innovation track of the conference, sharing information on the Intelligence MOOCs Commons for Women and eHealth (WeMOOCs), a WeObservatory’s initiative to support capacity building in the areas of women, health and technology. The WeMOOCs presentation generated interest on the compilation of massive open online courses in English, French and Spanish, currently offered in these three areas. We also brought attention to the current lack of MOOCs addressing the use of ICT for women’s and maternal health, calling upon interested parties to collaborate on the development of MOOCs on diverse perspectives of this topic.

Communiqué de presse
Lyon, le 17 mars 2015


Lutte contre la mortalité maternelle et infantile:



Le pôle femme-mère-enfant Natecia, 2ème maternité privée de France et 1ère de Rhône-Alpes, s’engage auprès du consortium international « Zero Mothers Die » avec une collaboration innovante et rare baptisée « Mum’s Phone ». A travers ce partenariat actif officialisé le mardi 17 mars, Natecia souhaite contribuer à la réduction de la mortalité maternelle dans le monde. Zoom sur cette initiative caritative qui allie technologie et informations sanitaires.




Près de 300 000 décès maternels et infantiles sont enregistrés chaque année dans le monde par l’Organisation Mondiale de la Santé, essentiellement en Afrique sub-saharienne. Fort de ce constat et avec une envie forte d’agir contre ce fléau de santé publique, la clinique privée Natecia a choisi de s’associer à la campagne internationale « Zero Mothers Die » lancée en septembre 2014 lors de l’Assemblée Générale des Nations Unies.

 

 

L’information maternelle au cœur du dispositif

 

A travers ce partenariat acté officiellement le 17 mars dernier, l’établissement de santé Natecia innove en proposant un concept inscrit au cœur des technologies actuelles et de la téléphonie mobile : « Par la création de Mum’s Phone, nous souhaitons utiliser le formidable potentiel des nouvelles technologies tel que le téléphone portable afin de faire bénéficier à toutes les futures mamans d’informations sanitaires, pratiques, dans leur langue locale. Grâce à ce don de téléphone mobile, toutes les mamans seront reliées et connectées grâce à des applications mobiles. Celles-ci seront sources de nombreuses informations de santé maternelle, vidéo et audio, particulièrement dédié au suivi de leur grossesse mais aussi après la naissance de leur bébé » explique Jean-Loup Durousset, Directeur de Natecia et Président du Groupe d’établissements de santé NOALYS. 

 

Avec ce partenariat, Natecia permet à toutes les futures mamans d’obtenir un téléphone pour un coût moyen de 30 euros. Le téléphone sera acheminé et distribué dans chaque établissement de santé local et doté de 30 minutes de communication gratuites par mois par maman. Les mamans bénéficiaires vont être formées à ces technologies ainsi qu’aux applications mobiles qui leur sont dédiées. «  Le personnel médical de Natecia sera également impliqué au cœur du dispositif puisqu’il formera des professionnels locaux, des infirmières, des sages-femmes et des médecins afin qu’ils puissent répondre eux-mêmes aux demandes des futures mamans, surtout en cas d’urgence obstétricale » précise Jean-Loup Durousset.