MomConnect is an initiative of the South African National Department of Health produced by the Praekelt Foundation. It uses cell phone based technology to support maternal health. It is available in all the 11 official

South African languages At least thirty-five languages are spoken in South Africa, twelve of which are official languages of South Africa: Ndebele, Pedi, Sotho, South African Sign Language, Swazi, Tsonga, Tswana, Venda, Afrikaans, Xhosa, Zulu, and English, which ...

. NurseConnect is a related project for maternity staff. It is the only nationally scaled

mHealth mHealth (also written as m-health or mhealth) is an abbreviation for mobile health, a term used for the practice of medicine and public health supported by mobile devices. The term is most commonly used in reference to using mobile communicatio ...

platform in

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. It was launched by

Aaron Motsoaledi Pakishe Aaron Motsoaledi (born 7 August 1958) is a South African politician is the Minister of Health (South Africa), Minister of Health in the cabinet of South Africa, having been appointed in this position with effect 3 July 2024. He was previo ...

in August 2014. More than 900,000 pregnant women signed up for weekly texts by December 2016. A specialist

HIV The human immunodeficiency viruses (HIV) are two species of '' Lentivirus'' (a subgroup of retrovirus) that infect humans. Over time, they cause acquired immunodeficiency syndrome (AIDS), a condition in which progressive failure of the im ...

service was started in 2017. The weekly SMS messages continue until the baby's first birthday. Pregnancies can be easily and quickly registered in the public health system using the system. The calls are free. Nearly 2 million pregnant women and new mothers have used it. From December 2017, it was made available on

WhatsApp WhatsApp (officially WhatsApp Messenger) is an American social media, instant messaging (IM), and voice-over-IP (VoIP) service owned by technology conglomerate Meta. It allows users to send text, voice messages and video messages, make vo ...

which allows richer and real-time interaction and makes delivery of personal messages more secure and affordable. The Helpdesk makes use of

machine learning Machine learning (ML) is a field of study in artificial intelligence concerned with the development and study of Computational statistics, statistical algorithms that can learn from data and generalise to unseen data, and thus perform Task ( ...

to help operators address

frequently asked questions A frequently asked questions (FAQ) list is often used in articles, websites, email lists, and online forums where common questions tend to recur, for example through posts or queries by new users related to common knowledge gaps. The purpose of a ...

. The

’s built-in location-based services enables users to see their nearest clinics. In its first five years it had over 2.7 million users, about 80% of pregnancies within the public sector. The helpdesk receives between 1000 and 7000 messages a day.

References

{{reflist Healthcare in South Africa Health care software