While COVID-19 has dominated our efforts
to stay safe, it's important to remember
that long before a global pandemic of this crisis,
unjust global health inequalities
continued to be under-reported.
One such issue is maternal health in the developing world.
In 2017, approximately 810 women died every day
from preventable causes related to pregnancy.
And in India, a woman dies in childbirth every 15 minutes.
The shocking loss of life is, in many cases,
due to families delaying decisions to seek care,
delays in reaching care, delays in receiving care.
Our next honoree is addressing this health crisis
by transforming the way that mothers
can receive advice and information.
ARMMAN leverages the connectivity of mobile technology
to expand information access
and preventative care access to services.
Using a free mobile voice service,
ARMMAN sends timed and targeted preventative information
in weekly transports to the mothers
all during their pregnancy and infancy.
In partnership with the government, ARMMAN has also created
a mobile academy to train frontline health workers
on lifesaving preventative health behaviors.
Through these and other services, ARMMAN is working
towards an India where pregnant women and mothers
are equipped with the best health information available.
The results are transformational.
Thank you Skoll.
It's a poignant moment for me receiving this award
in one of the first communities where we started our work
in Nala Sopara slums of Mumbai City
surrounded by some of the women and children we work with.
The story of ARMMAN really starts in my medical residency.
One day, a woman named Rupa from one of these slums,
arrived in labor convulsing with hypertension.
When I opened her records, I was stunned,
because I was looking at my own handwriting.
I had seen Rupa in the third month of pregnancy
but she never returned.
We constantly counsel women
to access care in the hospitals.
Rupa did.
But did I fail her?
I was tormented with guilt.
Did the overcrowding in the clinic mean
that I had not counseled her enough
to watch for signs of trouble?
To seek regular care?
I saw these stories play out daily.
Women and children dying in the most unjust of circumstances
due to conditions that should have never proved fatal.
If only they had access to a little information
at the right time.
If only the health workers were trained
to provide the right care when needed
before it was too late.
Given the sheer numbers, any solution or design
had to be scalable, accessible to the last woman
and child, and yet cost-effective.
Mobile technology enables that.
And our massive scale has only been possible
because so many of our partners, be it, NGOs, hospitals
and the government recognized the value of this approach
and provided the scaffold on which we grew.
We will go PAN India in the next five years
and use the massive amounts of data generated
to create tailored and targeted programs.
But it's not just about saving lives.
ARMMAN's journey has made it delightfully clear to me
that these women have an ingrained sense of justice,
a joie de vivre.
We see it over and over, give women a little information
and they start taking control of their circumstances
in ways they never did before.
Be it convincing their conservative families
to adopt family planning, or ensuring their girl child
gets the nutrition she needs against all odds.
Rupa did not survive.
But I like to think that she did not die in vain.
ARMMAN is in part her legacy.
Rupa and women like her instilled the spark in me
that now we try to instill
in the millions of women and children we serve.
And on behalf of all of them,
I thank Skoll from the bottom of my heart.
Thank you.