PROMPTS - Empowering underserved Kenyan mothers to seek timely, quality care

6 May

MLC Vanguard | Created by Jacaranda Health

2,213,273 Lives Impacted

A significant challenge in Kenya is that many women, especially those in the lower wealth quintiles, lack consistent access to clinically-accurate information to make informed decisions about when and where to seek care during and after pregnancy. Jacaranda launched PROMPTS in 2017 as a low-cost, scalable approach to empower underserved women across Kenya to seek timely, quality care, and build their agency to navigate the health system with confidence. For less than $1 per mother, PROMPTS has already reached 2.8+ million women in 22 Kenyan counties, with projections to reach 2M additional women by 2025.

Importantly, the platform has also driven measurable shifts in critical health seeking behaviours among new and expecting mothers::

81% of pregnant PROMPTS users attend 4 ANC visits
90% of high-risk mothers flagged by PROMPTS get care at the hospital
2x more likely for PROMPTS users to take up postpartum family planning
89% of PROMPTS mothers exclusively breastfeed for sixmonths postpartum

The Innovation

PROMPTS is Jacaranda’s AI-enabled digital health tool that offers lifesaving information and referral to underserved women in Kenya’s public health system. PROMPTS uses two-way SMS to empower mothers to seek care at the right time and place, and collects real-time data on their experiences of care to improve its quality. PROMPTS is designed to be maximize inclusiveness to all women, and designed to be scalable and sustainable within government health systems, as below:

Endorsed by the government for use on a national scale.
User-centered design for underserved mothers
Uses data to improve equity and amplify women’s voices
Maintains low unit cost for scale in public health systems
Based on inclusive technology: PROMPTS relies on SMS to engage with mothers, which is ubiquitous in Kenya and is a technology that doesn’t transfer data charges to the end userLeverages context-specific machine learning (ML) models to expedite women to care: PROMPT’s ML model is trained to read and provide contextually-sensitive responses to Swahili, English and ‘Sheng’ questions, with current work focused on customizing these models to other languages and domains, like MNH questions in Twi.

Implemented in
Eswatini, Ghana, Kenya

Get in touch
Laura Down, Head of Global Communications
ldown@jacarandahealth.org

About Jacaranda Health

Jacaranda Health is a non-profit whose primary goal is to improve quality of care and outcomes by deploying a package of low-cost, scalable solutions within government health systems, where the majority of underserved women and babies seek care. Jacaranda is based in Kenya, with government-partnered pilots in Eswatini and Ghana.