Digitizing Maternal Care
The Digitizing Maternal Care project tackled one of Kenya's most persistent health-system failures: fragmented, paper-based maternal records that followed no single mother from antenatal booking through postnatal follow-up. Community Health Workers (CHWs) operated with paper registers that were lost, damaged, or simply never transferred when mothers moved clinics or gave birth outside a facility. The result was a dangerous gap in continuity of care that cost lives.
Keeping Mothers Connected Across Every Point of Care
The Digitizing Maternal Care project tackled one of Kenya's most persistent health-system failures: fragmented, paper-based maternal records that followed no single mother from antenatal booking through postnatal follow-up. Community Health Workers (CHWs) operated with paper registers that were lost, damaged, or simply never transferred when mothers moved clinics or gave birth outside a facility. The result was a dangerous gap in continuity of care that cost lives.
"When mothers move between clinics, their records don't follow them — this single failure accounts for 30% of missed postnatal follow-ups in peri-urban areas. Designing a lightweight, offline-capable digital identity for maternal records closes this gap without requiring hospitals to upgrade infrastructure."
Our Approach
A structured, collaborative design methodology implemented across six sequential stages.
Outputs & Results
Measurable outcomes achieved through the programme's core activities.
YOUNG INNOVATORS TRAINED
Measuring Success
Success was defined not by technology adoption but by health outcomes. We tracked postnatal follow-up completion rates, record integrity across facility transfers, and CHW confidence scores before and after deployment. Every metric was co-designed with the Ministry of Health to ensure alignment with national health system KPIs.
