Ghana: Pregnant Women Turn to Prayer Over Medicine

A while back, I stumbled upon an interesting article titled "Pregnant Women Turn to Prayer Over Medicine"

I wanted to share it with the whole team, because it has some interesting information for the work we're doing and can really inform the design of the MoTeCH system and content delivered by MoTeCH to pregnant parents.

Soon after arriving in Ghana, Jess noticed the importance of appealing to the religious nature of individuals here as a way of fostering adoption, comfort and interest in content we will be delivering to pregnant parents with MoTeCH. I think this article validates Jess's instincts about the value that this could have. It's also very clear that we need to balance this closely with providing really solid scientific and medical information (which was always our goal) to ensure women begin to have a more accurate and complete understanding of health issues in pregnancy.


Jess and Kirsten both pointed out the fact that this article also indicates a strong need to educate expecting families that maternal care is free in Ghana. This is something we can address with reminders in our content throughout the pregnancy that free services are available through delivery. This is clearly low-hanging-fruit which we can address and hopefully with this education, we will see an increase in the number of women seeking ANC at facilities.