Every year 30,000 infants lose their lives due to complications related to birth or pregnancies – and this is in Ghana alone. A new application for smartphones aims to lower this number significantly.

At an event on Wednesday 6 December hosted by Maternity Foundation, UNFPA and the Embassy of Denmark in Ghana, the smartphone application “The Safe Delivery App” was launched. The event was attended by 44 midwives, doctors, other health staff, representatives of the Ministry of Health, Ghana Health Service, CHAG, and civil society organisations in the health sector and offered intensive thorough introduction to the application.

The application works by letting pregnant women, midwives or anyone else get access to download several simple instructions that are aimed to help solve some of the most common issues connected to pregnancies and births. The application downloads content whenever your phone is connected to the internet, so that people will be able to access the information even in parts of Ghana where internet connection is unstable.

“There is not always a trained midwife in the village and maybe not even a nurse. Therefore you send the women on, because people are not able to handle the birth locally, but sending a pregnant woman, who is bleeding, to a hospital hours away, is almost the same as sending a woman to death. With this birth app you can just avoid sending the women on," says Anna Cecilia Frellsen, CEO of Maternity Foundation.

More access to phones The idea to utilize mobile phone technology with the health sector is nothing new, but the demand and more importantly the effect of this technology has increased dramatically in later years. A decade ago only 1/5 people in the world had access to a mobile device, but in 2017 around half the world’s population has access to one.

The Maternity Foundation and the program to spread 'The Safe Delivery App' globally have since 2010 had H.M. Crown Princess Mary of Denmark as Protector and are currently cooperating with the University of Copenhagen, University of Southern Denmark and MSD for Mothers. The Maternity Foundation is also supported by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, the Obelske Familiefond Family Fund and the Kavli Foundation.

The Save Delivery App can be downloaded free of charge from this link Download to iPhone or iPad or Download to android.