Mumspring Pregnancy App

Abisola is the Founder of Mumspring - a health tech company that is enabling access to essential health services women and children. Her mission is to reverse the high newborn death trend in Africa, starting with Nigeria.

Abisola firmly believes that healthcare and education are the bedrock of sustainable development. Accordingly, she writes on the link between health, education and the development of African nations on Devex. 

Abisola started her career in the US Medtech industry working for Medtronic as a Software Engineer. For over a decade, she has gained experience in technology, project management and entrepreneurial leadership. In her role at mumspring, she has created over 20 jobs (direct and indirect).

Abisola is a mum of 2. She has an MBA from the London Business School. She earned Masters in Engineering Management from Columbia University and her Bachelors degree is in Electrical Engineering.

Mumspring is committed to preventing maternal and newborn death by using technology to provide prenatal education and affordable skilled care. Studies show that women who undergo prenatal education are more likely to seek skilled care and those who seek skilled care are more likely to have a healthy baby and a healthy pregnancy.

Our project is a mobile app that leverages artificial intelligence to provide time-sensitive information, guidance and medical support to pregnant women.

If scaled globally, our solution could elevate humanity by improving the outcomes of millions of at-risk pregnancies in low-income and middle-income countries, as well as indigenous communities in wealthy countries. Indigenous communities in high-income countries, have newborn death rates that are equal to low- and middle-income countries.

In Nigeria alone, there are more than two million high-risk pregnancies every year. Studies show that regular prenatal care can reduce neonatal death and disease. However, frontline health workers in Nigeria can only provide 15 percent of prenatal care coverage. Poor antenatal care coverage contributes to 200,000 newborn deaths, 300,000 stillbirths, and 700,000 premature babies born every year.

Our solution is a mobile app that delivers customized weekly antenatal guidance and support on physiological changes, nutritional needs and mental support throughout pregnancy. 

The mumspring pregnancy app enables wellness for pregnant women and newborns by providing:

1. weekly antenatal/prenatal education and empowering women to seek antenatal care from a skilled heath worker.

2. access to a medical specialist on the app, women are able to access quality care throughout their pregnancy and after childbirth, postpartum care and pediatric support.

3. community support and journaling to promote psychological, emotional, and mental wellness during pregnancy and beyond.

Our initial target population are pregnant women in Nigeria. We connect with them through community engagements to understand their needs. 

Most African women are ashamed to seek help because they are not sure what they need and would rather stay quiet than admit a lack of knowledge, due to the fear of being perceived as inadequate. Our solution empowers every pregnancy with information and gives her the confidence to seek support from a health worker.

Additionally, we are providing a source of income for the doctors, midwives and wellness specialists who support women throughout their pregnancy journey on the mumspring app.

Through this project, mumspring is driving action to solve one of the most difficult problems of our world: newborn death. This problem affects resource-limited nations and poor communities in weathly nations. These are traditionally underserved populations.

The mumspring app is also elevating opportunities for good health an wellness for women and children in Africa and of African-descent, who are traditionally left behind.

When I had my daughter in 2016. She was unable to breathe. We were Blessed to have amazing doctors who ensured she made it out alive a week later.

Ten days after she was born, I heard of a woman in Lagos who gave birth in the same week I did. Her child presented the same unresponsiveness and inability to breathe my child displayed and she lost the baby. Nothing was done to try to save the baby. Apparently, the hospital was not equipped to handle the situation.

That shocked me then let me on a journey to discover: Why? 

Why would a full term and otherwise healthy baby die? It turns out that there are many reasons why that can happen.

One of the reasons is poor prenatal care and lack of proper guidance. Access to prenatal care, education and support increases likelihood of a positive pregnancy outcome.  

My mission now is to ensure that women have the information and resources to make the best decisions for their pregnancy and their children. 

In Africa, over 1 million newborns die annually. 80% of these deaths are preventable (Source: WHO). I believe that every child deserves a chance to live. This begins with a healthy start at life. 

I am an African mother. I refuse to let our children continue to die and do nothing. I will not sit by silently. I will advocate and innovate until preventable newborn death ends in Africa. I have started with Nigeria - the country of my ancestry.

I am uniquely positioned to deliver this project because I have a great team. 

We have a strong technical and medical team that is dedicated to ensuring health for women. Our medical team consists of specialist doctors, nurses and midwives who have over 30 years of combined medical experience. We have spent the past 5 years understanding the technology needs of pregnant women and new mums. 

We also have local and international partnerships and relationships that have been nurtured over the years to establish our positioning.

To enable speed to market, we initially developed our telemedicine service in partnership with another tele-health company. However, we reached an obstacle regarding pricing. Our understanding of the market’s willingness to pay did not match with the cost structure proposed by the partner. Additionally the partner was not willing to enable the technology adaptations that would allow for a seamless user experiences for the user. It appeared that we had reached an impasse. At Mumspring, we are tireless in our pursuit to simplify things for the user so an overpriced service and inefficient workflow would simply not work.

I found technology resources we could merge into our stack that would enable us build the technology to handle telehealth sessions in a matter of 3 weeks. We hired and engaged our own medical team and now we offer a more robust service than we originally planned at a more competitive price. To top it off, I have convinced the partner to reconfigure their pricing for us. 

I am a pioneer. I am able to swiftly take advantage of opportunities for impact. A recent example has to do with Covid19.

Prior to Covid19, we were providing free prenatal guidance on the mumspring app with the goal of building a large community to monetize via advertising revenue.

We had planned to said a seed round of financing in March 2020. It was not a good time to engage investors as they were wary of the impact of Covid19 on the African market. We needed financial resources to keep progressing. I needed to find a new revenue stream. I swiftly pivoted to providing telemedicine services and created a new stream of income while enabling women get access to perinatal care remotely.

As a result of this pivot, Mumspring is the first integrated telemedicine provider of dedicated prenatal care, education and support in Africa. Africa has 25% of the population burden in the world but 2% of the doctors. This technology eases the burden on fragile  African health systems by connecting and enabling doctors from around the world provide care to women in Africa.

The traditional way of providing antenatal care and education is in-person inside a clinic or primary healthcare center. However, the current available frontline health workers available in Nigeria does not have the capacity to handle the volume of patients needing care.

Current frontline workers in Nigeria can only provide 15% of antenatal care coverage thus increasing the vulnerability of women and children.

With our solution, individualized care is possible using big data; targeted interventions are within reach using artificial intelligence; remote care provision is seamless from anywhere in the world using messaging (voice and text).

Essentially, We are leveraging technology to provide the capability for us to support the 85% of the population that our health system currently is not able to support due to capacity constraints.

By using the mumspring app, all women will have access to individualized antenatal care, mental and emotional health support and access to high quality prenatal and postpartum care at an affordable cost.

In the long run our solution will give women accessible skilled Labour & Delivery care. Today, 67% of births in Nigeria are performed in the absence of a skilled birth attendant. Studies show that having a skilled birth attendant increases the chances of survival of the mother and child during childbirth.

Over the next year, we will support 200,000 women and in Nigeria, Ghana and Canada (indigenous communities) and provide follow-on vaccination promotion to the mothers we support to we can ensure that we are fostering healthy communities.

In 5 years, we will have replicated our solution to reach 16 million women and children in at least 10 markets around the world.

The Elevate Prize will enable us meet our funding needs and position us to reach our goal of supporting millions of women through pregnancy and beyond.

Becoming an Elevate Prize Global Hero means I will inspire my daughters and every African woman to remain resilient and keep reaching for their dreams to create the impact and societal change needed in our communities. 

This 2-year program will be a transformational opportunity for mumspring. I thoroughly expect my assumptions to be challenged as I learn from mentors, coaches and peers. This is an amazing growth opportunity for me personally and as an entrepreneur.