Your Newborn

There’s nothing quite like the joy of bringing a new baby into the world. The heady mix of love, exhaustion and trepidation. Your newborn is tiny, beautiful and vulnerable. Even with plentiful resources, an NCT tribe and supportive postnatal care, those first weeks are still scary.

Globally, neonatal mortality accounts for 47% of all child deaths under 5. In Kenya, neonatal mortality rates have barely changed over the past 5 years. Babies are still dying in the earliest weeks of life. We want to change this. 

For Child.org, sparking progress in global child health begins with babies. We know how critical the first weeks and months are in ensuring that babies make it through to childhood to survive and thrive - that’s why we’ve been working to champion antenatal care, arming mums with life-saving information ahead of birth. Now, we want to go further. 

We want to provide new parents with the information they need for the birth of their new baby: from outlining a mum’s rights during birth and the practices that she can request within facilities, to providing key health information for newborns and encouraging parents to seek vital postnatal care. 

Your Newborn: Essential Health SMS is a free service connecting new parents with expert health advice and linking them with local health services - all directly through their mobile phone. Your Newborn will bridge the information gap in postnatal health, delivering crucial postnatal care information to new parents at home. A low-cost solution, we want to use Your Newborn to dramatically scale our reach and arm 5000 parents with essential newborn health advice, while also improving the provision of postnatal care by providing additional training on national postnatal care guidelines for community health workers in Nairobi and Kwale. 

But we need your help to kickstart the project.