AI midwife seeks to fill gaps in Zimbabwe's maternal health care

When Harare resident Samantha Murungweni found out she was pregnant for the first time earlier this year, she felt scared.

The 25-year-old, who lives in Greendale, one of the capital's suburbs, wasn't able to ask midwives all the questions she had when she registered for antenatal care at her local clinic. Zimbabwe’s public healthcare facilities often have lengthy queues. 

Murungweni sought help from friends and social media – but she struggled to get reliable information. 

Then a friend introduced her to DawaMom, an AI-powered chatbot designed to provide pregnancy-related information. 

“I asked about food that would keep both of us healthy,” Murungweni, who started using the service in her second trimester, told RFI. 

“I also asked about back pain, frequent urination and foetus movements in the uterus. It felt like I was talking to a real midwife.”

Easy access

Developed in 2024 by DawaHealth, a Zambia-based startup, DawaMom gives pregnant women and mothers validated medical information and connects them with licensed health workers via WhatsApp. 

While accessing the chatbot is free, users must pay a subscription fee for more advanced services such as personalised monitoring or home visits.

Tafadzwa Kalisto Munzwa, DawaHealth co-founder and chief executive officer, said they chose WhatsApp because millions of people across Southern Africa already use the platform to communicate with their families and access information directly from their smartphones. 

“Google is not accessible to everyone because internet data is expensive, but most people still keep a WhatsApp data bundle,” he told RFI.

Developers also sought to make the service more reliable than a traditional internet search. 

To ensure medical information is accurate and relevant to the local context, DawaMom does not generate answers from general content on the internet. Instead, it uses a technique known as retrieval-augmented generation to provide responses based exclusively on a verified database.

Munzwa said the team compiled information from dozens of medical sources – including Health Ministry guidelines, World Health Organization recommendations, medical school curricula and hospital protocols on women’s health – to create an authoritative knowledge base.

“More than 25 health workers translated and validated this content into Shona, Ndebele and Tonga. Every answer DawaMom gives is drawn from this database,” he said. 

Adapting the service to Zimbabwe’s multilingual context was also part of establishing trust.

“This year we also worked with more than 30 women from across Zimbabwe to build an English-Shona code-switching dataset,” said Munzwa. “This lets DawaMom understand the way people actually speak, mixing English and Shona, and reply by voice in a Shona accent that users find natural and understandable.”

According to the company, DawaMom has supported over 20,000 users to date. They are targeting 50,000 users by the end of 2026.

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Reducing pressure on health workers 

With a lack of funding in the health sector and mass migration of skilled professionals abroad, Zimbabwe faces severe shortages of health workers. 

Nurses and doctors handle heavy workloads, especially in rural areas. Zimbabwe had just over 22 health workers per 10,000 people in 2022, less than half the World Health Organization’s recommended 45 per 10,000, according to an analysis by the WHO and Ministry of Health. 

Elijah Dakwa, president of the Zimbabwe Medical Analytics and Informatics Network (ZiMAIN), which brings together medical professionals, researchers, data scientists and technology experts, says artificial intelligence can help ease the pressure on the country’s health workers – but only if it is used to support them rather than replace them. 

“Clinicians we have can focus on the high‑risk cases instead of being swamped by low‑acuity visits,” he told RFI.

Dakwa says building robust digital infrastructure, improving connectivity, making devices widely available and providing training are key to the adoption of AI in the health sector. 

“When that is in place, AI acts as a force multiplier: faster, more consistent, clearer decision-support systems for health workers and fewer unnecessary trips to central hospitals, which ultimately reduces congestion and workload across the system.”

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Identifying high-risk patients

According to Munzwa of DawaHealth, AI can act as a triage filter, identifying women who need urgent or in-person follow-up and those who can be reassured at home without visiting a clinic. 

“This means high-risk patients are less likely to be missed and are prioritised for follow-up, so limited staff and resources have more impact,” he said.

DawaMom connects pregnant women and mothers with licensed healthcare facilities and automatically identifies high-risk women, enabling the company to follow up with those who need additional care.

Rutendo, from Rusape in eastern Zimbabwe, used the chatbot to learn about numbness and spotting in the first trimester of her pregnancy. 

But one day, when she was in her final trimester, she became alarmed after going for days without feeling any movement from the foetus. 

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Rutendo consulted DawaMom and the chatbot advised her to see a doctor immediately.

She hurried to the nearby clinic where she was registered for antenatal care, but it was too late. The foetus had died after becoming tangled in the umbilical cord, a situation that can also lead to dangerous complications for the mother.

“The information I got saved my life,” said 31-year-old Rutendo, who asked RFI not to use her full name. 

In Harare, Murungweni gave birth to a girl last month. DawaMom eased her fears about becoming a mother.

“It helped me navigate pregnancy and gave me access to accurate medical information I was struggling to get elsewhere,” she said.