mHealth4Afrika alpha validation in rural and deep rural clinics in Ethiopia, Kenya, Malawi and South Africa

mHealth4Afrika is a collaborative research and innovation project, co-funded under Horizon 2020. It is focused on supporting Sustainable Development Goal 3 and Horizon 2020 Societal challenges by developing, researching and evaluating the potential impact of co-designing an open source, multilingual enabled mHealth platform to support quality community-based primary maternal healthcare delivery at semi-urban, rural and deep rural clinics, based on end-user requirements in Southern Africa (Malawi, South Africa), East Africa (Kenya) & Horn of Africa (Ethiopia). This paper aims to share the co-design process applied to develop and validate the alpha prototype, and the implications this had on the design of the beta platform. The validation of the alpha prototype was undertaken with 49 participants from 14 healthcare clinics across Northern Ethiopia, Western Kenya, Southern Malawi and Eastern Cape, South Africa during November–December 2016, using a mix of observation and semi-structured interviews. These findings have informed the co-design of the mHealth4Afrika beta platform, which will be installed in participating clinics on a phased basis during Q3 2017. The expected outcome is a multi-region proof of concept that can make a significant contribution in accelerating exploitation of mHealth across Africa.