MyBelle

MyBelle is a digital solution that aims to reduce preventable causes of maternal and childhood mortality in low resource settings. 

Our solution involves the development of a mobile application with five features. Our gamified education feature includes maternal health information with topics pertinent from prepartum to postpartum period in English and other four major Nigerian languages. The biometric tracking feature monitors the physical and mental health of users with weekly milestones and lifestyle tips based on the period of pregnancy. The financial toolkit feature unveils hidden costs of healthcare services to reduce the risk of seeking cheaper healthcare services from unlicensed personnel. This feature includes an option to create a saving plan tailored to the users' income level and subscribe to low-cost health insurance. We connect users to both stationary and mobile health clinics to circumvent distance-induced barriers to receiving healthcare. Lastly, an AI Chatbot that answers users' simple questions about their pregnancy and baby. 

To accelerate the progress of our innovation and have impact in rural areas, we partner with local and international organizations to distribute vitamins, pregnancy self kits, Intel’s COEL carbon monoxide detector bangle among others to hard to reach communities through our network with mobile clinics and primary healthcare centres.

In Nigeria, there are approximately 150 maternal mortality cases daily, accounting for over 20% of all worldwide maternal deaths. According to the World Health Organization (WHO), these statistics reflect the issues that cause unequal access to quality prenatal healthcare in Nigeria, including (I) PROXIMITY TO HEALTHCARE FACILITIES: More than 2 million Nigerians live over 2 hours away from the nearest hospital, many of whom are pregnant women. A survey conducted by our team at a Nigerian maternity clinic in Oyo State found that pregnant women have to commute over ~4 kilometers to the nearest hospital. Long commutes result in chronic maternal stress and adverse birth outcomes.(II) MANPOWER SHORTAGE: In Nigeria, there is 1 doctor for every 2,500 people, far below the WHO standard of 1 doctor per 600 residents. This issue must be resolved as over half of maternal deaths are caused by preeclampsia and hemorrhage as a result of inadequate dietary iron and folate. (III) LACK OF PRENATAL AND EARLY CHILDCARE INFORMATION: Beyond prenatal preventative measures to reduce maternal mortality, maternal interventions alone could lower 30 to 40 percent of worldwide infant mortalities, highlighting the need for educational resources to avoid preventable infant death. (IV) FINANCIAL PLANNING: Many poor women lack financial planning, which leads to increased child and mother mortality risk as they seek cheaper healthcare services from unlicensed personnel with ill-equipped facilities.

Our digital technology primary serves pregnant women in Nigeria with access to smartphones and the internet and aims to improve the quality of their pregnancy experience to reduce high pregnancy-related complications and deaths in Nigeria. 

Currently, there is no free digital application for pregnant Nigerian women and this is a major gap we want to bridge with MyBelle.

Also, our community initiatives strategies serve women and children in rural and urban settings in Nigeria to provide information and services that promote a healthy lifestyle. 

To ensure our app is tailored to the users’ preferences, surveys were conducted to understand our prospective users and validate our product. In December 2020, we conducted an online survey for Nigerian women within the childbearing age including images of MyBelle App prototype and a summary of each feature. We discovered that 98.3% of women surveyed would recommend our app to a pregnant friend. In January 2021, we visited a maternity clinic in the Oyo community and interviewed 25 pregnant women, and shared the MyBelle prototype. All the women desired to have MyBelle App after seeing the prototype.  We iterated based on the feedback we received before developing the lite version for our application based on preeclampsia, for testing. 9 pregnant women at the Oyo state maternity clinic were given the lite version to use for 30 minutes each and given a pre-and post-survey.  77.8% of the women surveyed did not know about preeclampsia prior to the app experience, and an average of 179% increase in the knowledge of preeclampsia was recorded after interacting with our app.  In October 2021 we conducted beta testing of MyBelle App at Adeoyo Maternity Teaching Hospital, Ibadan, Nigeria where pregnant women installed the App on their android phones. We recorded 95.2% user satisfaction and 90% would recommend the App to friends. The positive results validate the need for our solution by pregnant women in Nigeria to solve their pressing challenges and improve the quality of maternal healthcare.

Our mobile application is still in development and undergoing testing at every stage of development. 

Our testing is targeted at three states in Nigeria: Oyo, Lagos, and Anambra

We have conducted testing in Primary Healthcare Centres in Oyo, and Adeoyo Maternity Teaching Hospital Ibadan with about 50 pregnant women and received amazing feedback on the app features and user design and experience. 

Currently, we are having beta testing in Anambra state, Nigeria together with the distribution of vitamins and mineral supplements through the primary health care centers in the state. Communities covered include Ayamelum Local Government, Anambra East Local Government, Awka-north Local Government, and Anambra West Local Government.

Our technology is a software-mobile application. The mobile application will be embedded with AI that allows user to receive information and services targeted to their stage of pregnancy, BMI, pre-exisiting health condition and location. 

Within the microlearning feature, users can browse and read prenatal-focused articles or watch webinars from medical professionals with follow-up quizzes to consolidate their learning. And also learn how to create a healthy diet.

For lifestyle and biometric tracking features, users will be able to track their mental health status with a monthly summary and receive lifestyle tips with daily plans and reminders. Other features include kick counter, tracking glucose level, and blood pressure.

Users can also pose questions to our chatbot that can output answers based on their health profile. In this example, the user is asking about whether she can consume caffeine and a folate related question

The financial feature allows users to get personalized savings plan with calendar reminders weekly or monthly based on their preferences. Users can also opt for an insurance plan with our partners to make their savings more tangible.

Finally, users can browse through stationary and mobile clinic options available as well as see the cost breakdown which will help them make a more informed choice of maternal clinic.

In 2020, there were about 200 million Nigerians among which 7.6 million women give birth yearly. About 40 million Nigerian citizens have access to mobile phones and the internet. Considering the fertility rate and percentage of women of childbearing age in Nigeria, we estimated that about 1.52 million pregnant women in Nigeria have access to mobile phones and the internet. Hence, these 1.5 million women form our target market population. We plan to take 20% of our target market. That is, we estimate to have about 300,000 active users of MyBelle yearly. 

Through our partnership with Vitamin Angels, we got donations of Vitamin A, Multiple Mineral Supplement, and Albendazole for 16,000 pregnant women and children in hard-to-reach communities in Anambra state. Currently, we have distributed these supplies enough to reach over 4000 beneficiaries to primary healthcare centers in these communities through partnership with Parkers Mobile Clinic together with ongoing testing of the beta version of the MyBelle mobile application.

Using the current maternal mortality rate in Nigeria (800 deaths in 100,000 births) and the projected number of users,  we estimated that about 2,400 lives could be saved from pregnancy-related deaths and complications a year after our App launching.

Using the calculations above and the projected portion of the Nigerian population with access to mobile phones, we project that MyBelle could save up to 8,800 mothers from deaths or complications yearly by 2025. The MyBelle App will also help to reduce overcrowding and time wastage at clinics and hospitals, promote early detection of emergency conditions like preeclampsia, improve informed decisions regarding maternal health, reduce childhood mortality, and reduce the risk of mental health disorders among pregnant women.

Through our external collaborations and outreaches, we estimate to have impacted about 50,000 pregnant women and children in local communities in Oyo, Lagos, and Anambra states where we are piloting for the first year. 

Mybelle App impacts will be measured through:

Number of downloads 

Activities and time spent by average users

Reviews and testimonies from users 

Prospective research study within a community with a high number of users compared to areas with a low number of users 

Assessment of knowledge and adherence to healthcare information among users through quizzes on the App

Access to health insurance services through the App

Reduction in maternal and childhood mortality in Nigeria 

One of our major challenges is finance. We have raised $25000 in the last one year and this has been directed to developing and testing Android App. However, there is a growing number of iOS devices in Nigeria especially among women in urban areas who will benefit from low-cost insurance services of the mobile application. Hence, there is a need for more funding.

Secondly, technical challenges include the accuracy of the information and recommendation provided to the users through the App and AI Chatbot. To minimize this risk, we will have multiple iterations and testing rounds for our product before the actual launch and even after launching. We will also work closely with our medical advisors and partners to ensure that our product meets the industry standards. This will also mitigate legal risk.

Lastly is the cultural and market barrier. Nigeria is a very diverse country with over 250 ethnic groups. As a result, using information or data from an international dataset may not always produce the best output for users in Nigeria. We will ensure that Nigerian focused dataset is incorporated in the training process of our chatbot through our medical experts in Nigeria and interactions with target users. 

The members of our teams come from diverse backgrounds with a strong medical and scientific expertise to form a distinctly interdisciplinary team. Firstly, our team consists of a Nigerian medical doctor and 5th year medical student. In the past months, Abdulhammed (Project lead) has been on the field collecting primary data and research that has informed the design of our application. Dr. Charles Umeh who founded and operates a mobile health clinic in Nigeria, also advises us with his medical expertise and experience and will host the pilot in his mobile health clinic. Together, they have revealed and analyzed the specific needs of pregnant Nigerian women. That data is translated into relevant scientific information for our app by Amalia, our second Content and Outreach Lead who is a Ph.D. Candidate in the Biological and Biomedical Sciences Program at Harvard. Maria, who is a Biomedical Informatics Master Student at Stanford, and Dzung a mechanical engineering student from Singapore, have made use of our engineering and programming background to design the UX for MyBelle as well as act as the technical leads for the project. They created the initial “lite” prototype, but further development is being done by developers hired on contract. Abdullahi Aborode is assisting with content creation. Finally, we have a board of trustees which include Dr. A. I. Ayede who is a consultant Neonatology in Nigeria, Dr Ifeanyi Nwofor, Markus Bundschus, and two advisors from Stanford faculty experts in maternal mortality, Dr. Daniels and Dr. Suharwardy whose medical expertise in our project provides invaluable insight into our content and launch strategies.   

Together, we are confident that we will make MyBelle a successful social enterprise and uplift the pregnancy experience of many mothers in Nigeria.

Coalition member

Rationale for including

Not Applicable

Our broad sustainability mission: Is to improve the healthcare information and promotion (SDG3, SDG4), delivery of quality healthcare services (through connecting women to mobile and stationary health clinic options) (SDG3, SDG 10), and distribution of maternal and pregnancy information to traditional birth attendants (TBAs), pregnant women, their partners (SDG 2, SDG 3, SDG 4, SDG 5, SDG 10).

SDG 1: No poverty:

We aim to reduce health expenditures and the financial burden of healthcare services on women with issues related to their pregnancy and during labor. This will reduce mortality and morbidity associated with the inability to afford healthcare services. We will also direct funding to subsidize the cost of private maternal health insurance policies in collaboration with our partner, Hygeia HMO, a top Nigerian health insurance provider. 

SDG 2: Zero hunger: 

We aim to encourage and guide pregnant women on their nutritional maternal journeys through suggesting affordable and local food options to encourage a healthy pregnancy experience and reduce the incidence of malnutrition of both the mother and newborn through our nutrition-based microlearning platform. This content is developed alongside leaders in the field, including Dr. Shirley Isibhakhomen Ejoh, who is a faculty member of the School of Public Health at the University of Ibadan in the Department of Nutrition. 

SDG 3: Good Health and Well-being:

We aim to improve the accessibility to free and high-quality digital healthcare services. Through this, we aim to reduce preventable causes of both maternal morbidity and mortality through encouraging good health and well-being in synthesized content from medical and scientific leaders at the University of Ibadan, Harvard University, and Stanford University. 

SDG 4: Quality Education: 

We aim to improve knowledge and health education among traditional birth attendants (TBAs), pregnant women, and their partners. Through this contact network, we will empower all who seek to participate in the pregnancy experience by supporting healthy lifestyle decisions. 

SDG 5: Gender Equality:

We aim to leverage technology to reduce the inaccessibility to high quality digital health education regardless of gender or sexual orientation of our future users.To increase the access of mothers who are unable to use their partner’s phone, we will develop a partner login to participate in the pregnancy journey alongside the mother. We want to promote the empowerment of pregnant women through synthesizing and communicating healthcare information. 

SDG 10: Reduce Inequalities

We want to reduce the gap of health inequalities by providing everyone with free access to healthcare without discrimination. Improve the healthcare delivery of remote areas and resource health limited settings.