Jacaranda PROMPTS
An AI enabled digital health solution to address delays in maternal care seeking
While being amongst the most developed African countries, Kenya still has one of the world’s highest maternal mortality rates (51x that of the United Kingdom), with over 6,000 women dying during childbirth each year. One significant driver of maternal deaths is that women don’t know when and where to seek care at the appropriate time. Low health- seeking behaviour impacts a woman’s path from pregnancy to postpartum, leading to i) inadequate pregnancy support (62% of women don’t achieve 4+ ANC visits), ii) limited care during the postpartum period (43% percent don’t attend a postnatal check-up), and iii) poor uptake of postpartum family planning (50% of non-first births are delivered within 24 months of a previous birth). All lead to a higher risk of maternal and neonatal mortality.
In collaboration with Jacaranda Health (opens in new tab) and Strathmore University (opens in new tab), MSR Africa worked to develop language models to aid Jacaranda to categorize SMS messages from mothers and prioritize responding to these messages. A key focus was to develop methods to work better with noisy, and weakly labelled multilingual data for classification tasks.
Learn more
Watch the April 2024 Spotlight Talk (opens in new tab) from the MSR Africa Seminar by Stanslaus Mwongela (opens in new tab).