Achieving scale, sustainability and impact: a donor perspective on a mobile health messaging service and help desk (MomConnect) for South African mothers

Abstract

### Summary box Some of the first evidence of the impact of mobile health was through behaviour change communication, where simple text messaging was shown to improve healthy behaviours like smoking cessation and blood glucose monitoring.1 2 Early studies were concentrated in high-income settings, but given the ubiquity of mobile telephony in low-income countries and the burden of ill health, it did not take long for attention to shift to emerging markets like Africa and Asia. Maternal and child health was an area of priority. Low/middle-income countries were focused on meeting the maternal and child survival targets of Millennium Development Goals 4 and 5, and many of the evidence-based life-saving interventions in the pregnancy and postpartum period rely on changes in individual and household …