A companion through pregnancy, birth, and the first six weeks.
Mamawise is an offline-first, icon-led app that guides women through pregnancy and the postpartum period — built for the women least served by existing digital health tools: unreliable connectivity, limited formal education, no easy path to regular antenatal care.
World Health Organization, Maternal mortality fact sheet (2025).
Built for the connectivity and literacy the rest of digital health ignores.
Most maternal-health apps assume a data connection, a literate user, and English. Mamawise assumes none of those things — it runs entirely on the phone, is led by icons and pictures, reads its own content aloud, and ships in multiple languages. Every piece of health guidance traces back to WHO's 2016 antenatal care guidance.
Icon-led
Every content type is represented by a consistent icon before a word, so meaning survives even where reading is hard.
Offline-first
Not a cache of a web app — the database, content, and logic all live on the phone from install.
Private by default
An optional PIN lock protects a shared phone; a discreet, unbranded app identity is planned for higher-risk situations.
Speaks, not just shows
A built-in "listen" control reads any screen aloud in the active language, offline.
From the first missed period to six weeks after birth.
A complete, working companion for the highest-risk stretch of maternal health — not a set of features bolted onto a generic app.
Scheduled self check-ins
Four antenatal and three postnatal windows — a short branching questionnaire on mood, danger signs, alcohol use, nutrition, and birth readiness. Every answer is scored none / amber / red, with plain-language results and, when it matters, "what to say" talking points for the clinic visit.
Week-by-week pregnancy journey
Content from conception to birth calculated from due date, last period, or a clinic estimate. A one-tap danger-signs reference, a symptom & mood log, and reminders generated automatically from the WHO visit schedule.
Birth preparation & postpartum
A birth-prep checklist that surfaces from week 24, a birth-recording flow, and day-by-day guidance for the first six weeks after birth — covering the mother's recovery, the baby's needs, and what to watch for.
Content you can trust
Sourced from WHO ANC 2016 guidance, written in short, concrete, plain-language sentences. A schema-validated pipeline means corrections ship over the air, without an app-store review cycle.
Every design choice answers a documented barrier.
Mamawise's specific design choices aren't guesses — each responds directly to a barrier the mHealth research literature identifies.
The same research base shows what's achievable: SMS-based antenatal programs alone have been associated with a 174% increase in focused ANC visits and an 82% increase in skilled birth attendance; broader mHealth support has been linked to a fall in perinatal mortality from 36 to 19 per 1,000 births. Mamawise's premise is that a two-way, offline, icon-led tool can go further — while remaining usable in the same settings those programs were built for. Byrne et al., JMIR 2024 ↗
A complete, working product — not yet a validated one.
Mamawise is at the pre-launch stage, and we think that distinction is worth being direct about.
Built & working today
- Feature-complete Android build: onboarding, danger signs, symptom/mood log, reminders, self check-ins with clinic triage, birth prep, birth recording, postpartum guidance.
- Fully offline data layer with a real, tested schema-migration path.
- English content, complete and WHO-aligned, across all five content areas.
- Automated test suite covering check-in scoring, danger-sign matching, and date calculations.
In progress
- Spanish, French, Swahili, Hindi & Zulu content — scaffolded, gated so drafts are never shown as finished, awaiting professional health & language review.
- Not yet submitted to the Google Play Store.
- iOS not yet started — no build produced.
- Discreet mode exists as a setting toggle; the underlying behavior isn't implemented yet.
Not yet started
- No pilot, no CHW or clinic deployment, no real-world usage or outcome data yet.
- Marketing, distribution, and awareness-building haven't begun.
- This is exactly where a partner comes in — see below.
We're looking for the partners who can take this from built to validated.
Funding and in-kind partnership would go toward clinical & linguistic review, a store launch, a first real-world pilot, and reaching the women this was built for — rather than a fixed dollar figure, we'd rather scope the ask together.
Pilot sites
A CHW program, clinic network, or maternal-health NGO willing to put the app in front of real users.
Clinical & language review
In-country capacity to bring the five in-progress locales to release quality.
Distribution
Relationships that reach low-connectivity, low-literacy communities directly.
Funding
To carry the project from a complete product to a validated, deployed one.