We are excited to announce that ZMQ is joining Zero Mothers Die as a new partner providing mobile design expertise and mobile solutions for pregnant women at the base of the pyramid, including their award-winning Women Mobile Lifeline Channel.

ZMQ, a Technology for Development social enterprise based in India, creates "high-impact, low-cost" technology solutions to provide sustainable healthcare services to marginalized and under-privileged communities by utilizing the spread of mobile phones and increasing penetration of networks in rural areas in a massive and affordable way.

ZMQ has been a pioneer in using mobile technology and has successfully deployed over 40 behavior change projects using mobile phones, over 120 social mobile games and has created over 25 system changing solutions on mHealth for HIV/AIDS, TB, Maternal and Child Health, Immunization, FP, Polio, Mental Health and Chronic diseases.

In 2012, ZMQ started a new project called “Women Mobile Lifeline Channel" (also known as the MIRA Channel) - an integrated mobile channel to provide healthcare information and critical services through mobile phones to rural women at the base of the pyramid. The channel is designed for millions of semi-literate women using interactive graphics with audio/text support to provide information on pre-natal care and home-based neonatal care as well as providing various trackers for their pregnancy, immunization, menstrual cycle, family planning and infection prevention. The channel also connects women with local health system like Public Health Centers (PHCs) and Community Health Workers (CHWs). In 2013, the Women Mobile Lifeline Channel won the Millennium Alliance Award and the Mobile for Good Award as the best mobile health project in India.


To find out more, download their brochure - Women Mobile Lifeline Channel

We are excited to share that the Zero Mothers Die global project was presented at the 2014 Med-e-Tel Conference, an official event of the International Society for Telemedicine and eHealth (ISfTeH).

The presentation took place during a special session entitled "Women, eHealth and Telemedicine at all Ages of Life: From Birth to Old Age":

Zero Mothers Die was presented alongside other key eHealth projects during this Special Session on Women, hosted by ISfTeH's Working Group on Women (WoW) and the Women Observatory for eHealth (WeObservatory), an innovative Digital Inclusion Platform dedicated to global health challenges, developed in partnership by Connecting Nurses and the Millennia2025 Foundation.


Download the full program of the Session here.

Download the abstract for Zero Mothers Die here.

Last week, Zero Mothers Die was presented by Mrs. Coumba Touré, co-founder of Zero Mothers Die and Advanced Development for Africa Foundation, at the GSMA Mobile World Congress 2014 in Barcelona. The Congress had 85,000 attendees from over 200 countries around the world, making this a truly international stage for the presentation of Zero Mothers Die.

The presentation took place at a seminar entitled "Implementing mHealth" held by Mobile World Capital, a foundation accelerating the global growth of mobile and mobile transformation from Barcelona, alongside presentations by Orange Healthcare, IBM, Health Mavericks and others.

Zero Mothers Die featured in Thomson Reuters Foundation article by Lisa Anderson.


NEW YORK (Thomson Reuters Foundation)—For many rural expectant and new mothers, health care providers may be far away, but new technology is bringing them close through the mobile phone, now almost ubiquitous even in the poorest corners of the world. [...]


As a result, services offering mobile health care information are proliferating. The newest, Zero Mothers Die, launched its service last week to improve maternal, newborn and child health by providing pregnant  women and new mothers with mobile health information.

A global partnership between Advanced Development for Africa Foundation (ADA), Millennia 2025 Foundation, UNAIDS, telecommunications firm Airtel and UniversalDoctor, Zero Mothers Die aims to reduce maternal mortality and health complications, and accelerate mobile phone ownership and use by at-risk pregnant women in rural areas and the education of community health care workers.

Read the full article: New service uses mobile phones to reduce maternal mortality [Trust.org]

Zero Mothers Die featured in article by the International Federation of Gynecology and Obstetrics (FIGO), based in London, UK.

Mobile Phone Campaign Aims to 'Reduce Mothers Dying to Zero'

A new initiative to improve pregnant women's health via the distribution of mobile phones aims to eliminate maternal mortality entirely, according to its founder.

Zero Mothers Die, which will be piloted in Ghana next year, will take advantage of growing network coverage - thought now to cover 96 per cent of the world's population - to raise awareness of maternal complications in hard-to-reach areas, Reuters reports.

"We don't want to just reduce the number of women who are dying, but reduce it to zero through mobile phones," said Coumba Toure, president of Advanced Development for Africa Foundation, at a UN forum last week.

The project will supply 100,000 mobile phones per year, each with an allotted 30 minutes per month of free airtime restricted to calling health care providers or facilities. Each participant will also receive twice-weekly updates from MumHealth, a system that automatically delivers information on maternal and child health via text and voice messages in local languages.