AppLab

As a part of our MoTeCH initiative, we are holding content workshops to learn more about what types of information local women want and need in relation to their health. In Accra, Ghana, Eve’s Pregnancy School has offered lessons about pregnancy and motherhood to women  for over 10 years, and has seen over 2,000 mothers through safe pregnancy and delivery. The founder, Florence, gives bi-monthly classes to pregnant women and mothers; she attended our first content workshop recently and had lots of fantastic input for our program. One of the key takeaways from the workshop was that singing and music is an important part of Ghanaian culture and this class opened with the women singing a local song about womanhood, empowerment, and feminine beauty. It definitely got people excited! Part of the class was then given over to the group chanting “positive utterances” such as “my body is strong”, “i will have a safe delivery”, “my family loves me”, and “my husband loves me”. Teaching was interspersed between these more fun and participatory sessions.

These workshops, along with previous trials of interactive voice response systems in Uganda, have shown that people want the information services that we create to be fun as well as informative - not simply recorded information. As a result we are including some local songs in the audio recordings as a way to engage users. The video below shows a singing group in Vunania performing songs they prepared for the MoTeCH project about ANC, exclusive breastfeeding and importance of male involvement, in both Kassim and Nankam (main local languages). They put these together in just a day and it sounded great!

Live performance of the MoTeCH song:

For your interest, a translation of the songs is below:

NANKAM

First Song: Antenatal Care

If a woman is pregnant and agrees to go for antenatal clinics and takes all the necessary injections, on the day of her delivery she will deliver safely and a healthy baby as well. This will make her husband happy. This is an advice to all pregnant women and potential mothers.

Second Song:  Exclusive Breastfeeding

When you give birth don’t give water to the baby, the doctor said it. When you give birth don’t give water to the baby, the nurse said it. One breast is food for the baby. One breast is water for the baby. Giving the baby good health until six months.

KASIM

First Song: Antenatal Care

If a woman is pregnant, she should attend ante natal clinics for it has great benefits. If you do this on your day of delivery you will give birth to a healthy child and safely.

Second Song: Care Seeking Behavior

The health workers are here for us (the CHOs, community health volunteers and all health workers) to help us and our new born babies. All men should wake up and help us help us achieve this so we can get more help. Men should help their wives go for antenatal care and take their children for child welfare clinics.

Posted by:  Jessica Osborne, Program Officer

Tags: Communication, Culture, Ghana, Health, ICT4D, ICTI, Innovation, Mobile, MoTeCH, Pregnancy, Song, Video

This entry was posted on Tuesday, October 27th, 2009 at 12:37 pm and is filed under MoTeCH. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.