M&E of mama's mhealth program to improve quality of maternal health care

The Mobile Alliance for Maternal Action (MAMA) was launched in 2011 by USAID and Johnson & Johnson with Baby Center, mHealth Alliance and the UN Foundation. In country programs launched to date in Bangladesh and South Africa, it uses mobile technology to deliver time-sensitive, stage-based information on critical health issues to expectant and new mothers. There is a need for more evidence to measure or quantify the impact of mHealth and eHealth strategies on improved health outcomes. Most research in this emerging domain has been either qualitative, focusing on the user experience or the technical performance of mHealth systems. Developed in 2012, the MAMA global M&E framework guides the review of the MAMA program in countries by measuring performance, along with guidance on evaluation studies to be conducted to examine the effects of the program. It outlines key monitoring indicators that can be adapted to programs in different country contexts and builds the much needed evidence base on the relationship between mHealth messaging and greater access to health information by women. This framework has been implemented in the Bangladesh and South Africa programs to enable cross-country comparison of progress using a standard set of comparable measures. The results of this application will be presented herein in addition to guidance on mHealth program evaluation options including the use of formative research to develop programs, comparing the effectiveness of different mobile technologies, methods for measuring impact, qualitative research to examine the process of implementation, and special operations research studies.