TY - JOUR T1 - Achieving scale, sustainability and impact: a donor perspective on a mobile health messaging service and help desk (MomConnect) for South African mothers JF - BMJ Global Health DO - 10.1136/bmjgh-2017-000562 VL - 3 IS - Suppl 2 SP - e000562 AU - Joanne Peter Y1 - 2018/04/01 UR - http://gh.bmj.com/content/3/Suppl_2/e000562.abstract N2 - Summary boxMobile-based behaviour change communication has been pursued to reduce maternal and child morbidity and mortality in low-resource settings.Several messaging programmes have achieved high user numbers but have struggled to match this with financial and institutional sustainability and evidence of improved health outcomes (scale, sustainability and impact).MomConnect is a flagship South African National Department of Health service that uses mobile technology to register pregnant women, send them vital health information to support pregnancy and the first year of life and provide channels for patient queries and feedback.Over 1.7 million women have been registered to the platform since its launch in August 2014, with over 60% coverage of all pregnant women nationally.MomConnect has combined significant upfront risk capital from donors and strong government leadership to create a universally accessible platform integrated into the South African health system.The initially simple concept of a behaviour change communication programme has become much more: MomConnect generates demand for health services while also collecting data to strengthen supply and presents an opportunity to link mothers and children to further health and social services.Some of the first evidence of the impact of mobile health was through behaviour change communication, where simple text messaging was shown to improve healthy behaviours like smoking cessation and blood glucose monitoring.1 2 Early studies were concentrated in high-income settings, but given the ubiquity of mobile telephony in low-income countries and the burden of ill health, it did not take long for attention to shift to emerging markets like Africa and Asia.Maternal and child health was an area of priority. Low/middle-income countries were focused on meeting the maternal and child survival targets of Millennium Development Goals 4 and 5, and many of the evidence-based life-saving interventions in the pregnancy and postpartum period rely on changes in individual and household … ER -