MomConnect is a South African National Department of Health initiative which aims to support maternal health through the use of cell phone based technologies integrated into maternal and child health services. The services are free to the user, and messages are available in all our 11 official languages. MomConnect is voluntary and the pregnant woman can opt out at any time.

As patient groups go, pregnant women and new mothers are among the most motivated. They’re eager for information on how to care for themselves and their children, and quick to take action to ensure their children have the best start in life.

But in some low-income countries around the world, accessing high-quality health information at exactly the right time is not always easy. Recognizing the role a mobile phone could play in reaching expectant and new mothers, Johnson & Johnson made a commitment to Every Woman Every Child in 2010 to work with partners to reach women in six countries with evidence-based messages to motivate behavior change, and increase the likelihood that women would seek out antenatal health services.

Eight years after the initial Johnson & Johnson commitment, three of the six country programmes (Bangladesh, India, and South Africa) have reached more than a million mothers each.

This free, national, and comprehensive system delivers targeted health information based on pregnancy stage to pregnant and postpartum women. It enables women to ask questions and establishes a feedback loop to improve services at public healthcare facilities.

MEASURE Evaluation Strategic Information for South Africa (MEval-SIFSA) helped implement the initiative, supporting operations and project management through seconded staff, messaging and registration support, operations research to improve the program, and integration of a help desk within other help desks of the health system. The project also conducted a data security assessment to determine compliance to best practices and principles and found gaps in 11 of 13 categories of assessment, which made the system information vulnerable to serious disruption.

Operations research identified factors impeding implementation about six months after launch. Only when training materials and methods were adapted was MomConnect able to achieve its target of registering one million mothers. Limited connectivity at some times of the day was a partial reason for this gap. To overcome this challenge and ensure that mothers were registered, the health department accepted a booklet in which the mother’s details were recorded for digital registration at a more suitable time.