Giving Compass' Take:
- Abisola Oladapo launched a technology service and app that provides prenatal and early childhood healthcare services to support Nigerian mothers.
- Oladapo utilized her own health care experience as inspiration to tackle infant mortality. How can donors support social innovators who are making a difference in their communities?
- Learn about how education and sanitization could dramatically reduce global infant mortality.
What is Giving Compass?
We connect donors to learning resources and ways to support community-led solutions. Learn more about us.
As the poverty capital of the world, Nigeria’s problems are many and technology has proven to be a great way to solve some of the issues the country is dealing with. Health care, access to credit, and accountability are some areas where innovation is being used to solve problems.
Child mortality is a particularly worrying area: 1 in 8 Nigerian children never reach the age of 5, according to the Nigeria Demographic Health Survey (NDHS, 2018).
But it was a more personal experience that inspired Abisola Oladapo to start working on Mumspring, a healthtech company that uses technology to provide stage by stage pregnancy and post-pregnancy information to pregnant women before childbirth and through the first three years of their journey through motherhood.
Global Citizen spoke with Oladapo about Mumspring and how it is using technology to help Nigeria reduce the high rates of maternal and child mortality.
Global Citizen: Why did you build Mumspring?
When I gave birth to my second child, she was born unable to breathe. Thankfully, she survived that ordeal. This experience took me down a research wormhole and I discovered that if I had just a little bit more information [for example, about pregnancy-related complications], my baby wouldn't have been in that situation.
How is Mumspring impacting young Nigerian mothers?
At Mumspring, we provide perinatal solutions to every mother. One of our core solutions is Agnes [an app]. Through Agnes, we provide access to antenatal education and enable continuity of medical support for marginalised women.
In the short-term, we measure our impact based on the number of health modules delivered and the likelihood of the beneficiaries to use a health facility or professional for their delivery.
As we scale and reach more women, we will measure impact based on the reduction in infant mortality and maternal mortality in the communities we serve.
Read the full article about the remarkable Nigerian mother using tech to help women survive childbirth by Akindare Okunola at Global Citizen.