Safaricom is not just good at mobile money transfer, having launched M-PESA March 2007 and now over 15 million customers and over 37,000 Agent outlets countrywide.
Friday July 12 Safaricom Business won top honours at the 3rd CIO Awards held in Kigali, Rwanda for its maternal and child health care mobile-based platform.
The platform dubbed Kenya Integrated Mobile Maternal, Newborn & Child Health Information Platform (KIMMNCHIP Initiative), was launched in August 2011 to help reduce infant and maternal mortality rate.
KIMMNCHIP offers pregnant women in Kenya more choice, control and care during their pregnancy, and improved medical care for them and their babies during and after delivery. It also allows mothers to use feature phones to receive ‘push’ SMS” banking on the fact that Kenya’s mobile phone penetration stands at 75 percent according to the CCK, the country’s telecom regulator.
The panel of judges praised KIMMNCHIP platform as a timely given the few medical care providers in local hospitals.
The platform provides an advisory service to expectant women who register and provide their due date. It then goes further to provide them access to call-in advisory hotlines and information databases for maternal newborn child healthcare issues for free.
“We are very honoured to be receiving the recognition for the KIMMNCHIP platform. We are still in the process of developing it to make more robust so that it can offer end-to-end solutions for all maternal healthcare issues. Among the new features we intend to add, is one that links the expectant women to transport to the nearest hospital,” said Sylvia Mulinge the General Manager of Safaricom Business.
She added that the KIMMNCHIP platform is in line Safaricom’s overall goal, to Transform Lives and integrates information from various medical databases, and stores it in the Safaricom Cloud from where it is easily retrieved by the mothers and community health workers.
Safaricom Business is an internet service and enterprise solutions provider and an enterprise business arm of Safaricom Ltd.