Project Lead(s): Amelia Kyambadde
Issue
Maternal mortality remains a major issue in Uganda, where many women still die during and following childbirth from severe bleeding, infection and obstructed labour.
Similar to other marginalized and powerless communities, rural pregnant women in Uganda have lacked visibility and a meaningful voice in discussing how to address their own high rates of mortality.
Solution
The objective of the project, called Maama Ne Maama (MNM), was to reduce maternal deaths by enabling pregnant women to record their experiences in receiving healthcare, and to provide platforms to share their powerful stories with peers and policymakers.
The approach was based on previous research showing that, while data are critical for presenting scientific facts, individual stories are more effective in changing the way people make decisions and in generating social action.
This approach placed rural Ugandan women in control of their own storytelling and empowered them to speak about their healthcare experiences.
Each Maama Story is a powerful digital resource that can be easily shared person-to-person or broadcast widely by community healthcare teams, health centre staff and advocates, to trigger emotional reactions that change the way pregnant women, policymakers and the public understand issues, perceive risks and make decisions.
Eleven Maama Stories – short videos of mothers discussing their pregnancy and birth experiences – were produced.
The videos are available at the local health centres, where they play on televisions in the waiting rooms. They are also available to the public on Youtube.com/MaamaNeMaama, as well as on the website, maamanemaama.org. Additionally, the videos are being screened directly in the communities in what have become maternal health festivals.
Outcome
A case-control attitudes assessment of nearly 200 mothers in Mpigi, Uganda, showed that mothers – via mass media channels – are viable and desired messengers for antenatal care information, compared to the preferred but least scalable approach of in-person visits from a health professional.
This finding supports the hypothesis that targeting hearts with powerful, relatable and personal stories, told by mothers through existing popular media channels, is a more effective, desired, cost-effective and scalable communications approach than the current means of conveying health messages – group information sessions led by already overburdened health centre staff, foreign educators, and outdated posters taped to the walls.
The current study was not designed to assess how effective Maama Story videos were in reducing maternal mortality, as this would have required a much longer and more complex evaluation.
Information about the project has been disseminated through conferences and $83,309 in funding was received from an unknown donor.
The videos and materials produced during the project will continue to be used by the healthcare workers in sensitizing the public about safe childbirth and antenatal care.
The first step to scaling the project would be to develop a project plan to identify mothers, collect footage, edit videos and disseminate them across the communities.