Alain Nteff, a 25-year-old, has tackled a huge problem facing his home country of Cameroon: high maternal and infant mortality rates. Nteff noticed the high mortality rates while visiting a hospital in Cameroon, recognizing situations that could have been prevented with prior information and cheap prenatal care. A few years after first identifying the problem, Nteff was able to develop a smart and effective solution, Gifted Mom.
Gifted Mom is an SMS service that provides mothers with health advice and information, both during and after pregnancy. For a minimal fee, mothers can sign up for the service to receive regular advice and even ask doctors personal questions relating to their pregnancies. The brilliance of this idea is its low cost and effectiveness. Rather than expensively and slowly developing a mobile application, Nteff chose to provide information through SMS messages. This keeps costs down for the entrepreneurial venture and allows Nteff to connect with more expectant mothers that may not have smartphones, for a fraction of the price.
Nteff’s innovation is genius in its cleverness and simplicity. By identifying a major source of maternal and infant mortality, lack of information, Nteff could innovate without developing any new technology or handling any complex logistics complications. The solution allowed Nteff to reach a large number of mothers as a small-scale venture, without requiring significant built-up capital or investment. This means that Nteff’s solution in a poverty-stricken Africa actually came to light, saving lives with a few text messages. Gifted Mom is enormously inspiring, reminding entrepreneurs that not all problems require a complex, richly-funded solution. World problems can be solved with the specific identification of the problem, clever thinking, and the reapplication of a long-established technology.