MIRA CHANNEL

About the project

Last updated in September 2023

MIRA Channel is a n integrated mobile phone channel to provide health communication [&] information tools, health services connect to rural women through mobile phones in low-resource settings in India. It provides critical health information to rural women on issues related Ante-natal Care, Child immunization [&] Newborn care. It is an Iconic Interactive ‘Talking Toolkit’ for easy understanding of semi-literate women. MIRA connects women with Public Health system for service delivery. It identifies High Risk Pregnancies (HRPs) early and connects women with public health centers to take timely action. The platform generates Live-Data for the state to take decisions. MIIRA has numerous value-added services (VAS) like decision-making stories and social mobile games for raising awareness and motivating audiences to adopt new behaviors. It has now been adopted and scaled in the two more developing countries – Uganda and Afghanistan.

MIRA tackles one of the most critical development issues of maternal and child health. It provides communication tools, health management tools and connects women with public health service system. The lack of reproductive rights of women, maternal and child health communication tools, and disconnect with public health services in remote areas in India, is the key to poor health indicators. Due to this, like any under-developed and developing country, India also has a very high maternal mortality rate of 212/100,000 live births, Infant mortality rate of 52/1,000 live births in India. Also, majority of the women opt for traditional method of home-based delivery (51.1% of deliveries in India), putting both mother and child health in high risk.

MIRA channel helps rural women to self-manage their health, get them connected to the public health centers for services and create a holistic eco-system to track each and every woman during pregnancies and children for immunization. The short term goal is to increase ANC visits, institutional deliveries and immunization rates. The long term goal of the project is to reduce Maternal Mortality and Infant Mortality rates. One of the latest studies done based on the ‘Gateway Behavior Theory’, pregnant women who have been visited at least 21 times during the total period of her pregnancy (in MIRA program, one visit per week is mandatory and a MIRA is expected to be follow it), the women will 100% deliver at the hospital and neither the mother nor the will die at the time of the birth.

In 2023, a scale-up phase is currently replicating the project in Ghana and Nigeria after successful replications were implemented in Ethiopia and Rwanda.