The following post is contributed by the Women’s Refugee Commission (WRC) who launched the Mama project. To read a blog post by Marketing for International Development (M4ID), who worked with the WRC to design the platform, click here. This post was originally posted on the WRC blog and is posted here with permission.

One thousand women and girls die every day from pregnancy-related causes—that’s about one every 90 seconds. And the overwhelming majority of the countries with the highest rates of maternal mortality are conflict-affected. Yet, the numerous campaigns and programs working to reduce our staggering global maternal mortality numbers don’t reach the health care providers working in these dangerous and isolated areas. Working in a relative vacuum with little peer interaction, doctors, nurses, midwives and other health care workers in crisis-affected settings face tremendous challenges without the peer support, information, skills-building opportunities and training that they desperately need.

Mama: Together for Safe Births in Crises, a new initiative designed by the Women’s Refugee Commission and social media and development company M4ID, will be launched April 21. Mama is designed to improve maternal health care and reduce maternal death and disability in crisis-affected settings specifically by using social networking to open up new channels of communication—to connect frontline providers in disparate areas to one another and to give them access to training and advice from experts.

Though in remote locations, these health care providers told the Women’s Refugee Commission that they use SMS text messaging as their main means of communication and use Facebook fairly regularly. The Mama initiative connects the two in a way never before attempted—for example, allowing texts from a member of the Mama community to stream directly to a Facebook page and for responses posted on the Facebook page that receive at least three “thumbs up” to be streamed back to the person who sent the original query. The campaign also includes Mama Mentors, technical experts who visit the virtual community on a monthly basis to share their medical expertise, professional development advice and words of encouragement. Once a member of the Mama community, a health care provider is no longer alone—he or she will receive peer support and guidance in the most convenient manner possible. At the same time, we’re keeping the threshold for their participation low to encourage use and maximize the benefits to the community.

The Women’s Refugee Commission feels strongly that it’s time to go beyond policy to focus on finding ways for maternal health care professionals on the ground to work to improve their skills. Social networking and technology provide vast unexplored ways in which to do just that and we’re excited to take this groundbreaking first step.

Check out the campaign!

The following post is contributed by Mari Tikkanen, Managing Director of Marketing for International Development (M4ID), which designed the platform for the Mama project with the Women’s Refugee Commission (WRC). To read a blog post from the WRC on Mama, click here. This post also appears on M4ID’s blog and is posted here with permission.

A new M4ID-designed Facebook and SMS communications initiative, Mama: Together for Safe Births in Crises, was launched today in New York by the Women’s Refugee Commission. The project addresses an important information gap for maternal health workers in emergencies, as identified by WRC research.

Through Mama, health workers are now able to identify themselves as maternal health champions within humanitarian organizations or in the field and to join a community of practice. Maternal health practitioners will, though five innovative applications, be able to seek advice from fellow members, share best practices and lessons learned, assess their own practices/skills level and test their knowledge of the MISP (minimal initial service package). Mama also offers rewards through digital badges for actions taken as well as a ‘Lives Saved Counter’ application through which the community can register when they enabled a safe birth, showing the positive impact of their work.

Mama is also an unprecedented initiative as it addresses the isolation faced by many health workers in the field through the use of new technology. For the first time, practitioners who may not have access to the Internet or smart phones will be able to send their questions/comments about maternal health to the Facebook community via SMS. This text message is posted to the Mama Facebook wall through a Facebook application. The other community members can reply to the question and the answer is sent as a text message back to the practioner. The answer is filtered by the community before it is sent back, and has to be recommended by three members before it is sent.

The project also involves Mama Mentors who provide knowledge on technical updates and answer specific questions. The community will focus on different technical/programmatic themes each month and new mentors will be invited to join in and support discussions.

We are very proud of this innovative project and look forward to providing continued support to Mama and WRC!