Afeto App

Every year, more than 400 thousand teenagers between 15 and 19 years old become mothers in our country. The average number of pregnant women in this age group in Brazil is the highest when compared to Latin American countries and, beyond that, the lack of care during pregnancy is the biggest cause of death among teenagers of this age. It was in the desire to combat this scenario that we thought of Afeto, a mobile application that aims to help pregnant teenagers by connecting them trough a catalog with health professionals who offer their services at a popular price. Now imagine if we could call attention for two topics in one: pregnancy during adolescence and the health of those girls. This is not only an delicated situation in Brazil, we can instruct and save girls all over the globe by calling attention to this specific topic.

We are trying to lower health consequences for early pregnancies among adolescents as pregnancy and childbirth complications are the leading cause of death among girls aged 15–19 years globally. We are talking about 400 thousand girls per year in our community and 12 million girls in developing regions, all of them between this range of age. We also have at least 777 thousand girls under 15 years giving birth each year. The main factors that contribute to this problem are: as we have a lot of unintended pregnancies, a lot of these girls don't visit any doctor during this period - because they don't know of it, because they don't know the importance of it or even because they doesn't want anyone to know. 

You can find this and more data here: World Health Organization.

Afeto is a mobile application that connect pregnant young girls to people who can help. There's a catalog with health professionals who offer their services at a popular price and a donation's features, where recent moms can donate their items to someone who are in need of those. The difference between Afeto and others pregnancy and motherhood apps is that Afeto aims to help girls who had an unexpect pregnancy and don't know what to do next and can't afford everything who involves having a baby.

We target girls from 15 to 19 years who are pregnant, specially those with unintended pregnancies. We are proactively testing with our public in our city, always looking for feedbacks in every feature we present. We listen to them and we have provided an email and a phone number for them to reach us in case of doubts, suggestions, ideas and criticism. Our focus is to give them a way to have proper health care during pregnancy with a fair price, by giving them a catalog of doctors who already had or agreed to have popular prices for this specific public. 

Most of all, our goal is to provide affordable health care for pregnant teenagers by offering a catalog of doctors with popular prices. This problem can be directly related to diseases during and after pregnancy - if you improve health care, you have a tendency to decrease diseases. By giving these girls the opportunity to have a good assistance during pregnancy, we believe it's an informal way to give them mental and emotional health as they know what's happening, they are being taking care of.

Today, in Brazil, there are more than 400 thousand pregnant teenagers and many of them die from lack of care during pregnancy. About 60% of these maternal deaths are preventable. Also 75% of adolescents who have children are out from school. Afeto is a solution that supports pregnant young women (mainly low-income) to gain access to information and connect with other people who are mobilized with the cause and want to help. Our technology promotes collaborative assistance to help pregnant girls, especially those who aren't expecting this and have no money to afford a prenancy and baby's care and also didn't recieved much information about it because of the lack of educational system in those poor areas. Most of the apps right now speaks directly with woman who actually planned this baby and can afford this.

Afeto is a native Java application developed on Android Studio. The native code is much more innovative. Native apps achieve a better endeavor of the device's tools, which results in a better user experience.

Its performance is also better. Due to the fact that it contains a source code made in the language suggested by the maintainer of the device, complications and security flaws are much less frequent.

Native apps also provide a much more positive user experience, due to their optimization for operating systems. However, it is difficult to explain the option of a native application, since the hybrid and mobile web apps are not far behind in this matter, except in very characteristic cases.

It is common knowledge that Java Android probably came to make mobile development more comfortable. Nowadays, Java is the most used language for electronic commerce and simple applications for the Android operating system.

We use Firebase as a NoSQL database. Firebase uses the JSON standard to save your data, which facilitates handling and structuring and has better performance with large data volumes.

Afeto is an Android application developed natively in Java and uses the cloud service Firebase, to save all registrations of doctors and pregnant women.

We are currently a beta app on the Play Store. The link to access the project's github is https://github.com/mthaismacha...

We show a bit of how our app works at this promotional video, and we have prototpype mock up here and here. 

A goal for Affection for this year:

- make it available also in the IOS version.

- establish partnerships with pharmacy attendants, so that they give affection pamphlets associated with the pregnancy test.

A goal for Affection 5 years ago:

- it becomes an application used by young managers throughout Brazil, especially in areas such as in northeastern Brazil, seen according to statistics is the place in the country with the highest rate of young pregnant women with little  access to information.

- have a function in the app that helps to instruct young people to deal with pregnancy, facilitating access to information.

- features for accompanying mothers of the first trip.

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Currently we are a group of 3. 

Pillar Benedetti (leader and bussiness supervisor), Ana Figueiredo (user experience designer and social media) and Thais Machado (developer).

Afeto App came out after a visit at an non-profit organization located in a poor area of Rio de Janeiro. Since then, seeing the number of pregnant young girls who need help with quality information about motherhood, we realized that most Brazilian apps are made for girls who are able to have a child at the moment. Our team is made by women who are close to this reality, since some of us grew up at poor areas and have close friends who got pregnant at a very young age, who are our primary users, helping with tests. We are a young group of woman but we also have a strong background, working with business, non-profit organizations, design and technology for 5+ years.

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Key Partners - Doctors and health professionals; non profit organizations; baby and children's stores, social media content creatores who are pregnant e/or are moms.

Key Activities - Doctors list by each zone/neighbourhood; Donations list by each zone/neighbourhood; a finance feature which helps the organization.

Key Resources - Mobile development, design, data base.

Value Proposition - Connecting health care professionals with pregnant young girls in social vulnerability situaiton.

Costumer Relationship - Achieving and 

Costumer Segments - Young girls in social vulnerability situaiton who are going through an unexpected pregnancy in need for care and information.

Channels - App, social media, e-mail.

Cost Structure - Cloud computing, updates fee, developers team.

Revenue Streams - A freemium fee and a sales plan to health care units and professionals.

Partnerships - we are seeking for partnerships with non-profit organizations, health care professionals, hospitals and stores.

Donations and grant - we are currently sending applications.

Membership fee - we are developing a Freemium fee.

Revenue - later on we are going to start with products purchases, advertisements and donation buttons. 

We are applying to help Afeto App with, in first place, online recognition, because we believe that social platforms is where the girls first look for help. Besides that, we need funding and help to accelerate the growing.

We expect to have support, such as grant, advices and mentorship at the service distribution, since we are still at the beta step of the implementation. Also we are currently appling to get some funding, because we need more people on the team who could help us, such as health professionals and delevopers. At this point, we do not have an accounting, so a mentorship at legal area should me helpful as well. About the marketing, what we seek is partnerships with big companies to help spread and distribuite the app. 

With Afeto App, we believe we can achieve girls from, not only our country, but to expand to Latin America and other places where the problem of pregnant young girls is still growing. We intent to use the technology that is provided to us to make the difference in their lives, and hopefully, they will speak up and help us to take hope to the girls that are going through the same thing they did.