Veronica Kavindu was in the last trimester of her second pregnancy when she began experiencing worrisome symptoms. Headaches, swollen legs and abdominal cramps — she felt something wasn’t right.
“For the first pregnancy, I had never experienced such things,” said Kavindu, a resident of Kenya’s Makueni County, southeast of the capital Nairobi.
Without access to a clinic or a knowledgeable family member or neighbour, answers were hard to come by. Connectivity can be spotty and many people in the area don’t have computers and smartphones, making it difficult to access information that might be found online. But Kavindu did have a mobile phone, and that turned out to be exactly the tool she needed to get answers.
She turned to PROMPTS, a free, AI-enabled service that connects women to maternal and newborn health information via two-way SMS text exchanges on their mobile phones. PROMPTS advised Kavindu to drink more water and elevate her legs, and to visit a health centre if she started bleeding. “I never knew dehydration could cause such symptoms,” she said, “but they told me every pregnancy is different.”
The PROMPTS tool was designed in Kenya by local health and AI experts who understand the lives and needs of Kavindu and women like her. PROMPTS has a simple design that doesn’t use a lot of data. It offers advice in local languages, not just English, using non-medical, everyday terms. PROMPTS embodies the vision of a responsible AI ecosystem where local experts are enabled to solve their own development challenges with safe, inclusive, rights-based and sustainable AI applications and policies.
Jacaranda Health, a non-profit organization in Kenya, developed PROMPTS, in collaboration with the Kenyan government, to get women the information they need to care for themselves and their babies through pregnancy and post-partum. In Makueni County alone, PROMPTS reached nearly 118,000 pregnant women and new mothers between 2019 and 2024, working with 32 health facilities in the county.
Typically, a woman enrols in PROMPTS at her first antenatal care visit. She then receives SMS messages directly to her phone about what to expect during pregnancy. At the same time, she can ask a question via her phone. For simple questions, such as the types of food to eat during pregnancy, the AI-enabled help desk will respond automatically. If it detects a more serious scenario, PROMPTS will instantly connect the woman to a trained desk agent. The safety of the mother dictates if and how AI-enabled services are used.
“All of this is designed to get a mom to go to the hospital at the right time, but also to know what to expect when she goes to a hospital, so that she is more empowered to demand the kind of care that she should be getting,” said Anneka Wickramanayake, director of Research, Evaluation and Design at Jacaranda.
Kavindu benefited from both the AI-driven resources and the personal touch of hearing from a person through PROMPTS.
“Somebody called me and they interviewed me about the progress, what I was going through and the challenges I had been facing,” she said. “Once they called me, that’s the time I got to know that, oh, this is real. It felt so good.”
The PROMPTS tool initially fielded 100 questions a day, but by February 2025, it was receiving about 12,000 questions a day, with 3 million mothers registered on PROMPTS — far more than can be handled by human staff alone.
PROMPTS received funding from a global health project funded through the Artificial Intelligence for Development (AI4D) partnership between IDRC, the United Kingdom’s Foreign Commonwealth and Development Office and research partners across the Global South. The project helps tailor PROMPTS to address women facing different forms of co-existing vulnerabilities, enabling the system to support women like Kavindu by looking beyond purely clinical data. Factors such as socio-economic background, literacy level and access to health care, for example, all influence health outcomes for mothers and their babies.
PROMPTS is featured in IDRC’s new discussion paper on artificial intelligence for global health. The impact of this tool demonstrates the value of research to identify problems and develop solutions, especially when led by those closest to the issue.
“PROMPTS at its core is designed to give personalized information to moms based on who she is and what we know about her history,” said Jacaranda’s Wickramanayake.
Of course, some women are not getting messages of any kind because they don’t own a mobile phone. In these cases, women enrolled in PROMPTS often meet up with friends and neighbours to share their newly acquired knowledge. For her part, Kavindu has passed on information like the importance of a balanced diet, how to wean a baby and the need to space child births.
“Once I learn something from the messages, I share it with friends to make sure it is useful for both of us,” she said.