Across sub-Saharan Africa, maternal and women’s mortality remains unacceptably high. Preventable complications during pregnancy and childbirth kill hundreds of thousands of women each year. Beyond maternal health, cervical cancer, anemia and urinary tract infections go undiagnosed and untreated for far too long, often until they become life-threatening.
The barriers are clear: clinics don’t have diagnostics tools, test results take weeks, expert doctors are unavailable and healthcare costs are prohibitive. Women often delay seeking care, sometimes with tragic consequences.
DawaMom works across multiple channels to meet women where they are.
- In slums and rural clinics, DawaMom integrates an imaging and screening platform, leveraging data science and machine learning. It empowers midwives with specialist-level modalities, and enables women to walk in for quick screening and testing.
- Our AI assistant, a multilingual RAG-based chatbot, provides medically validated health advice in local and code-switch languages (including Shona, Ndebele, Nyanja, Tonga, Bemba, Lozi and English). Women can ask questions about pregnancy, postpartum care, contraception and reproductive care, and receive trustworthy answers in their own language.
- For cervical cancer screening, our AI-powered vision technology analyzes cervix pictures for cervical cancer, enabling early detection. It includes HPV self-test kits, automated analysis and clear referral pathways for follow-up care.
- For anemia screening, a non-invasive AI model estimates hemoglobin levels by analyzing photos of the lower eyelid. It helps identify women at risk of severe anemia, particularly before and after childbirth.
- For ultrasound screening, DawaMom supports frontline health workers with gestational dating, basic ultrasound interpretation, and automatic flagging of high-risk pregnancies that need referral and specialist care.
Fast, quality care
DawaMom is already serving women and girls across Zambia and Zimbabwe. Women report feeling respected and cared for by the platform's health workers. Diagnoses that once took days-to-weeks now happen in the same clinic visit. Expert sonographers and doctors provide remote consultations for frontline midwives to support primary health workers, ensuring quality care even in remote areas.
Since joining UNICEF Femtech Ventures, DawaMom has reached 1,989 women and girls across five clinic sites supported by 10 community health workers, screened more than 198 women for high-risk conditions, supported 28 healthy births, and grown to 581 active users on its multilingual WhatsApp chatbot.
DawaMom's vision is to support the scale of a decentralized healthcare system where every woman in sub-Saharan Africa, regardless of geography or income, can access quality reproductive and maternal health services. By combining community health workers with AI diagnostics and last-mile clinics, DawaMom is leveraging frontier technology to solve some of the world's most pressing health equity challenges.
