What is the name of your organization?
Jacaranda Health
What is the name of your solution?
PROMPTS
Provide a one-line summary or tagline for your solution.
Empowering mothers to navigate pregnancy and postpartum care through AI-enabled SMS support
In what city, town, or region is your solution team headquartered?
Nairobi, Kenya
In what country is your solution team headquartered?
Kenya
What type of organization is your solution team?
Nonprofit
Film your elevator pitch.
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What specific problem are you solving?
Across Africa, too many mothers and babies still die from preventable causes because basic information fails to reach the people who need it. In Kenya, 30% of maternal deaths, roughly 36,000 deaths each year, are driven by delays in seeking care (Ministry of Health, 2017), and severe, yet preventable, maternal and newborn health (MNH) conditions are detected too late. 33% of women in Kenya do not achieve the recommended 4+ antenatal visits and 43% don’t receive a checkup in the critical weeks postpartum. The delays are compounded by the fact that, once the care seeking decision is made, many women lack appropriate and personalised support to find the right health services. Timely and specific connection to care require an understanding of patient risk factors and referral pathways available before they reach care.
This triple challenge - (1) lack of information, (2) lack of connection to care support, and (3) lack of data to determine a women’s care pathway could be addressed at scale through accessible digital health tools. Yet despite growing investment in digital health globally, few solutions have been adequately adapted to low-resource settings, designed around client experience, or embedded within government systems, leaving many underserved populations behind.
What is your solution?
PROMPTS is an AI-enabled, SMS-based digital health platform that supports mothers throughout the pregnancy and postpartum period with personalized health information and connection to care. Mothers are enrolled through public health facilities and receive stage-based messages aligned with national health guidelines, including reminders for checkups and information related to nutrition, breastfeeding, family planning, and danger signs.
PROMPTS also includes a two-way helpdesk that allows mothers to ask questions and report symptoms in real time. The platform currently handles more than 15,000 maternal health questions each day using a multilingual AI system trained on millions of real conversations with mothers. Built on Gemma-based infrastructure (adapted for African contexts/languages), the model helps distinguish routine questions from more serious cases. It answers common questions automatically and connects higher-risk questions to trained nurses for follow-up support and referral guidance. The platform is designed to operate efficiently at scale and works on basic mobile phones, allowing it to reach populations often excluded from app-based digital health services.
PROMPTS generates real-time data on mothers’ experiences and care-seeking behaviors, helping governments and health systems understand and respond to patient needs. The platform is implemented with governments and implementing partners across Kenya, Ghana, Tanzania, and Nigeria.
Who does your solution serve, and in what ways will the solution impact their lives?
Jacaranda’s aim is that all mothers access timely, quality care in the public health system. Underserved pregnant and post-partum women are the primary end-users of PROMPTS. We currently reach women in Kenya, Ghana, Nigeria, and Tanzania. The platform primarily serves mothers seeking care in public health systems, including low-income women, adolescents, rural populations.
Many of these women face barriers to timely, quality care. Across Kenya, 33% of women do not complete the recommended antenatal care visits and 43% do not receive a postnatal checkup. These challenges are often more acute for underserved populations, who face informational barriers, poorer quality care, and few formal channels to ask questions or share feedback about their experiences in the health system.
PROMPTS was designed specifically to work for these populations. The platform operates through free SMS messaging on basic mobile phones, making it accessible to mothers who may not have internet access or digital literacy. Mothers receive personalized pregnancy and postpartum health information, reminders for routine care visits, direct answers to questions, and referral support when higher-risk concerns are identified. Jacaranda is also piloting voice-based features to better support women with low literacy and expand accessibility further.
