Every year, 289,000 women and more than 5 million newborns die as a result of complications in pregnancy or childbirth. Of these deaths, 99% are in developing countries. The vast majority of deaths could be avoided if the women in question had the support of a skilled birth attendant.
The development organization Maternity Foundation has been working since 2005 to save the lives of women and newborns threatened by complications in pregnancy and childbirth. The organisation focuses in particular on the training and capacity building of health workers in developing countries.
More than 380,000 family members have received Maternity Foundation’s mother-child health training and 19,000 women have been given access to safe childbirth at Maternity’s affiliated hospitals and health clinics in Ethiopia.
Partnerships creating new solutions
Inspired by the business world in general and the consultancy branch specifically, Maternity Foundation takes an entrepreneur-oriented and partnership-based approach to development work.
Maternity Foundation is working with businesses, researchers and NGOs to find innovative, new solutions to help more mothers and newborns across sub-Saharan Africa. Lately, the organization has worked with a number of business partners, including MSD for Mothers, PA Consulting and Qlik to develop The Safe Delivery App.
The Safe Delivery App
In April 2015, Maternity Foundation launched The Safe Delivery App in collaboration with researchers from the University of Copenhagen and the University of Southern Denmark. The App was launched in attendance by Maternity Foundation’s patron, Her Royal Highness Crown Princess Mary.
The Safe Delivery App builds on the rapid proliferation of mobile telephony in Africa, where there are already more than 600 million mobile phone users.
The app features animated videos that provide instruction for health workers in developing countries in handling child birth complications, for example if the mother begins to bleed after giving birth or the newborn is not breathing. The videos, available both in English and local languages, can be used irrespective of poor literacy skills and language barriers.
New research results from Ethiopia show that The Safe Delivery App can significantly increase the ability of birth attendants to save lives.
Watch the video below to see how the Safe Delivery App works.
Project Manager Lise Knudsen from Maternity Foundation became a Premium member of The Social Business Club to learn more about how to use a partnership-based approach to create new solutions and make a social change. See her testimonial in the section to the left.
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