Tackling Maternal Health Through Cell Phones: Evaluating a Collaborative Framework

Abstract

Information communication technologies can serve as a crucial missing link toward tacking wicked problems of social welfare policy implementation through collaborative governance. Using a mixed methods approach, a pre- and postanalyses were used to investigate whether and how cell phones can increase awareness of pregnant women about different cash and service benefits of maternal health benefit policies of 82 pregnant women in a remote tribal community in Melghat forest of Maharashtra, India. Pregnant women received customized prerecorded bilingual audio calls on their mobile phones about maternal health benefit policies. The author then traced whether those audio messages increased the claiming of policy benefits and public engagement. The key contribution of this research is that contrary to the optimism about digital governance, findings suggest that cell phones are not a “silver bullet” for increasing receipt of maternal health benefits. This book chapter concludes with the prescription that the impact of mobile phones and other information technologies will be marginal as long as there are administrative deficiencies in policy implementation and a misalignment in state and federal policy designs.

Citation

Mali, N.V. (2018), "Tackling Maternal Health Through Cell Phones: Evaluating a Collaborative Framework", From Austerity to Abundance? (Critical Perspectives on International Public Sector Management, Vol. 6), Emerald Publishing Limited, Leeds, pp. 75-89. https://doi.org/10.1108/S2045-794420180000006004