The World Health Organization (WHO) reports that Nigeria accounts for over 34 percent of global maternal deaths.
Nigeria represents less than 3% of the world’s population but contributes to 10% of global deaths for pregnant mothers.
In a bid to combat this high maternal and infant death rate, Helpmum, a Nigerian health tech startup, has been relentlessly providing solutions to these problems as well as baring unsafe abortions.
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The health-tech startup also provides life-saving health information to pregnant women and nursing mothers in their indigenous languages.
HelpMum uses the power of mobile technology and low-cost innovation to tackle maternal and infant mortality in remote, rural areas of Nigeria.
Recently, the health-tech startup was awarded a $250,000 grant by the United States’ Patrick J. McGovern Foundation, a global 21st-century philanthropy foundation bridging the frontiers of artificial intelligence, data science, and social impact to create a thriving, equitable, and sustainable future for all.
The grant awarded, is to support the deployment of an AI-Driven Vaccine Intervention Optimiser – ADVISER, in Nigeria. ADVISER, is an AI framework designed to optimize intervention allocation to improve Nigeria’s immunization rates.
The vaccination intervention optimizer is based on an integer linear program that seeks to maximize the cumulative probability of successful vaccination.
Helpmum disclosed that the $250,000 grant will enable the company to deploy the AI solution to achieve and ensure optimal vaccination of infants across Nigeria and also scale up its goal of improving maternal and infant health across Africa.
It is however interesting to note that the grant also makes HelpMum the first Nigerian startup to receive grant funding and partnership with the Mcgovern Foundation, which has awarded $330 million in grants since its inception.
Speaking on the grant, the Founder and Chief Executive Officer of HelpMum, Dr. Abiodun Adereni said:
“With this funding, we will be able to deploy ADVISER, which will be the first AI-driven vaccination uptake program in Nigeria. Our optimization formulation is intractable in practice and we present a heuristic approach that enables us to solve the problem for real-world use cases. We also present theoretical bounds for the heuristic method.
“The grant by the Patrick J. McGovern Foundation is another milestone for HelpMum which has over the years been a recipient of grant funding from players in the health system globally like Facebook, Google, Global Citizen, United Nations Geneva, World Connect USA, International Youth Foundation and David weekley Foundation,”
He also added that the AI solution has the capacity to tell which mother would default on immunizing their kids, as it will use the data and information provided by these mothers in the registration process to optimize their default tendencies.