UNICEF, together with the Department of Health (DOH) and PhilHealth collaborated to develop a national health insurance benefit package for prematurity and small babies launched in late 2016. The project seeks to catalyze the readiness of government hospitals to be contracted for the special health financing package.

Sailendra Appanah of EnerGaia Bangladesh Ltd in Bangladesh will teach low-income women in rural Bangladesh to farm Spirulina, which is an edible protein- and nutrient-rich microalgae, to provide better nutrition and an income for them and their families. They have developed a low-cost Spirulina production system comprising closed tanks with filtered air and water inputs, and a business model that provides the farmers with a lease-to-own financing solution and guaranteed buyers of excess product. They will recruit 30 interested women from Dhaka, Bangladesh, and pay them a small wage to undergo three months of training at their local Spirulina farm. They will then provide them with tanks through the lease-to-own program, help them with installation and operation, and process the fresh spirulina produce for sale or for local consumption. They will evaluate the effect of their approach on income and malnutrition in the community.

Lorraine Weatherspoon of Michigan State University in the U.S. will develop a blended instant bean sauce in an edible pouch that provides a culturally-acceptable iron and folic acid supplement for low-income pregnant women in Uganda. Iron and folic acid are particularly important during pregnancy as they reduce the risk of low birth weight and neural tube defects amongst many other morbidities and mortalities also for the mothers. Supplements provided as tablets are available, but have not been widely accepted. They are developing a more appealing iron and folic acid supplement by combining it with a commonly used product: a bean and silver fish sauce that can be made with local ingredients. They are using dried namulonge beans as they have high yields and a desirable taste, mixed with roasted, milled silver fish and micronutrients, packaged in an edible film to protect the food during storage and transport. The food is cooked in hot water and eaten with traditional foods such as cooking banana or rice. They will assess the nutritional composite of the product and acceptability by the target group. Their product will then be tested in a randomized controlled trial with teenage women at different stages of pregnancy at an antenatal clinic in Kampala to determine its effect on nutrition during pregnancy and the overall health of the mother and child at birth.

Joachim Loo of Nanyang Technical University in Singapore will develop techniques to encapsulate micronutrients such as iron for food fortification using okara, which is a nutritionally-rich pulp that is made as a wasted by-product during the production of soybean products. Micronutrient malnutrition affects two billion people globally. Providing micronutrients in the diet is difficult because they are unstable by themselves, and so need some form of protection, for example by encapsulating them in a stable, digestible material. Okara is produced in large quantities during the production of soybean products like tofu and soya milk, leading to high environmental and economic costs for disposal. They will determine whether okara can be repurposed as an encapsulation material for micronutrients by developing and testing drying and sterilization methods and designing protocols to encapsulate vitamin A and iron. They will then evaluate the ability of the okara microcapsules to release bioactive micronutrients when exposed to artificial gastric and intestinal fluids.

Owens Wiwa of the Clinton Health Access Initiative in the U.S. will determine whether providing free vouchers for mothers to receive a nutrient-dense food can help infants with moderate acute malnutrition in Nigeria. By linking the vouchers to attendance at immunization clinics, they also hope to boost immunization coverage. Malnutrition is a major public health concern in Nigeria, where almost one third of children are underweight, and ten percent are wasted. However, improving nutrition in poor and rural households is difficult because of a lack of education and limited access to nutritional foods. They will pilot test their approach in a randomized controlled trial at two locations by training healthcare workers at immunization centers to council mothers on feeding practices and to monitor infant growth to identify malnutrition. The mothers of malnourished infants between six and 23 months old will be provided with vouchers to receive three months' worth of an existing fortified food, which will be provided at a local health facility. They will evaluate the effect of their approach on the infants' nutritional status and immunization coverage.

Tsegaye Nega of Carleton College in the U.S. will develop methods to produce and distribute affordable nutritional food supplements made from excess, dried spent grains from the brewery process. Beer production has grown recently in Ethiopia, and a by-product, brewer's spent grain, is rich in fiber and protein and can be easily added to bread to boost its nutritional content. They will perform a pilot study in Addis Ababa and Dukem, Ethiopia, where they will partner with a major brewing company to access the starting materials, and determine the standards needed for this human-grade food and the production and distribution setups required. They will also further develop nutritional product marketing and testing. Their approach is a low-cost, sustainable solution to combat malnutrition in Ethiopia.

Samantha Dolan and Peter Rabinowitz of the University of Washington in the U.S., and Ian Njeru of I-TECH Kenya, will improve digital data collection and monitoring of childhood immunizations at Kenyan health facilities by optimizing workflows. Using electronic tools to track immunizations has the potential to improve the accuracy of data collection and reporting, identify children who have not been vaccinated, and free up time for health care workers. To fully realize this potential, workflow patterns need optimizing for different types of health facilities. They will use an iterative approach with so-called Lean methods to maximise value while reducing waste, and time-motion study techniques to evaluate current workflows and identify bottlenecks that reduce efficiency. These workflows will then be redesigned and tested across different sizes and types of facilities in Kenya. They will also compare the efficiency and performance of electronic registries with paper-based registries.

Matt Berg of Ona in the U.S. will combine high-resolution satellite images, spatial sampling statistics, and mobile data collection to better calculate local immunization coverage in Bangladesh. Current approaches often vastly overestimate coverage because of the difficulty in calculating actual population sizes from nationwide data and birth registries. As a more effective approach, they will use satellite imagery to detect liveable structures within a set area, and software that selects possible households that require verification by community surveillance teams. These teams will be supplied with offline maps and a mobile application to note actual households and record the immunization status of any children under five. These data will then be used to generate maps to visualize actual coverage and identify areas with the greatest immunization needs. They will develop tools for automation, coverage calculations, and map visualizations to supplement their existing mapping and mobile data collection tools and test their approach in a research site in Bangladesh.

Ross Boyce at the University of North Carolina in the U.S. will develop an approach that uses new methods of mapping households together with available health data to better identify places that have limited access to healthcare to improve immunization coverage. Many sub-Saharan African countries have very poor rates of childhood vaccination coverage. Improving coverage requires identifying those households and areas with poor access to healthcare, but this is challenging with the limited data available. To more accurately measure healthcare access and thereby immunization coverage, they will perform a six-month study in a rural sub-county of western Uganda. By providing user-friendly tools to health workers and providers, they will generate more accurate household maps and assess three different metrics of healthcare access using freely available software and a Bayesian statistical framework. They will evaluate the accuracy of their approach for predicting coverage by conducting a cross-sectional survey to determine the vaccination status of all children aged between 12 and 23 months in the sub-county.

Michael Nunan of Beyond Essential Systems in Australia will build on their existing data platform to collect and analyze vaccine data in real-time to provide an early warning of areas or facilities with low immunization coverage. The platform integrates data from various sources, including vaccine supply and healthcare infrastructure such as equipment and staff. They will further develop it to record actual vaccine administrations from health workers entering details on mobile phones, and to produce local estimates of vaccine demand and actual coverage and provide alerts. They will also integrate real-time monitoring of the cold supply chain using sensors. Their system will be evaluated in the Solomon Islands and Vanuatu by comparing it with current methods for estimating vaccine demand and coverage.

Benjamin Fels and Suvrit Sra of Macro-Eyes, Inc. in the U.S. will engage with frontline health workers in immunization centers and combine their knowledge with existing supply chain and immunization data using machine learning to better predict vaccine demand and thereby improve immunization coverage. Vaccine supply levels in Ethiopia are predicted using data that may be inaccurate or outdated. These low-confidence data could be enhanced with the unique insights of frontline health workers by using machine learning, which is a valuable statistical method for increasing the accuracy of predictions. They will test this at three health centers in Ethiopia by exploring approaches such as WhatsApp to engage health workers and collect relevant information on vaccine stocks and demand in the clinics. These data, along with available supply data, will be used to train so-called classifiers, or algorithms, that transform the input data into more accurate predictions of monthly vaccine use. They will test whether their method improves the accuracy of predictions compared to the original methods.

Pierluigi Bonello of Ohio State University in the U.S. will develop a surveillance system for crops using unmanned aerial vehicles (drones) to position sensors to help diagnose plant diseases in low-income countries. Plant diseases are usually identified first by the farmers or human scouts and then confirmed by laboratory testing. This process is inefficient and requires resources often unavailable in low-income countries, calling for alternative approaches. It is known that when a plant becomes infected, it produces specific chemicals. In addition, functional chemical groups in biological samples are known to vibrate in predictable ways after absorbing light. They will test whether this information can be exploited for the rapid and widespread detection of two plant diseases, rice blast and maize dwarf mosaic, by vibrational spectroscopy that could be positioned inside crop canopies by drones. Rice and maize grown in greenhouses and fields in the U.S. will be infected, and they will develop statistical methods to evaluate whether handheld spectrometers can distinguish between infected and uninfected plants. This technology could ultimately allow crop managers to control the spread of a disease even before plants show visual symptoms.

James Bell of Rothamsted Research in the United Kingdom will test an integrated surveillance system for the real-time detection of ground and upper atmospheric levels of the fall armyworm, which is a moth that devastates maize crops. Maize is a vital food source in Kenya but is currently largely imported and has become too expensive for most households. They propose to help local farmers grow maize by developing an early warning system for the African moth pests. Their system will integrate an entomological radar to detect moths flying up to 1,200 metres overhead, with twenty ground traps covering 7,000 km2 that transmit data to a central institute, and a smart-phone application for workers and growers that automatically detects the caterpillars and moths. They will optimize the equipment and software to detect the specific moth species and test it in a region of Western Kenya over one year. Their system will also reveal details of seasonal moth migrations, ground spread, and crop growth to help develop effective pest management strategies.

Bruce Grieve of Manchester University in the United Kingdom will develop a low-cost, stereo-printed sensor that mimics plant leaves and stems and can detect and signal the presence of live pathogens as an early warning system to help protect crops in low-resource settings. They will demonstrate proof-of-concept of their approach in the laboratory by designing three dimensional sensors with specific patterns of cells and chemically-doped polymers to identify an ideal surface on which pathogenic fungal spores can grow and differentiate. Incorporated sensor cells will be designed to detect the live pathogens and produce a detectable response, such as a visible density change, and results can be stored locally or transmitted wirelessly. They will test different sensor designs for the detection of rust pathogens in wheat. Their approach can be adapted to detect multiple pathogens simultaneously, including viruses, as well as for human and livestock pathogens, and when deployed in the field can ultimately be linked to national surveillance systems.

Christopher Gilligan of the University of Cambridge in the United Kingdom will develop a data collection and analysis platform for crop diseases that uses Bayesian modelling frameworks to better integrate data from diverse sources and identifies cost-effective pest and disease control solutions for small-holder farmers. Current crop disease surveillance programs generally collect data from limited sources and lack the capacity to use the data to advise farmers how to manage any disease outbreaks. By integrating a wider variety of data, including meteorological data, and grower and market behaviour such as household nutrition, their approach can predict much broader consequences of crop diseases on individual households and thereby provide more valuable solutions. They will focus on pests and diseases of maize, wheat, and cassava in East Africa and pilot test their SMS and smart phone platform by holding training workshops for participants, testing data analytics and validating the results.

Menale Kassie of the International Centre of Insect Physiology and Ecology in Kenya along with Ram Fishman and Opher Mendelsohn from Tel Aviv University in Israel will take a community-based crowdsourcing approach to crop protection of smallholder farms in low-resource settings by developing a simple software platform for basic feature phones to monitor pest incidence. Human-based monitoring of crops is the most accurate way to identify pests, but there are too few public monitoring agents in low-resource settings, leaving the majority of farms unprotected. Engaging the smallholder farmers to monitor their own crops is a promising solution, but most of them lack sophisticated equipment like smart phones and have low technical knowledge, so simpler solutions are needed. Therefore, they will adapt commercially-available software that collates and analyzes pest incidence data for basic feature phones and, together with smallholder farmers, design simple interfaces for SMS communication. They will test their approach by performing a pilot study to monitor wheat and maize, covering one to two counties in Kenya, and teach smallholder farmers and government agents how to use the monitoring system and compare the data with that collected by expert field agents.

Janos Zempleni of the University of Nebraska-Lincoln in the U.S. will test whether supplementing milk formula with exosomes from milk could have the potential to improve the growth of babies aged between 6 and 12 months and help protect them from infections. Exosomes are membrane-bound vesicles naturally present in all bodily fluids and are thought to transfer small molecules such as RNAs between different cells to regulate various cell functions. However, during the production of milk formula for babies, the exosomes are destroyed. They have preliminary data demonstrating that RNAs and exosomes in milk enhance growth and the immune response in mouse pups. They will expand these studies to confirm their results in mice, with a view to progressing to clinical trials to test the value of exosome-fortified milk formula in humans.

Chinedu Chugbo of Avigo Health L.L.C. in the U.S. will develop an approach to crowdsource reports of infant births and deaths from community members by health workers to better monitor vaccine coverage in low- to middle-income countries. In Nigeria, only 30% of births are registered, making it difficult to estimate numbers of vaccine-eligible children and ensure every child is properly vaccinated. Current methods for estimating population sizes include household surveys, which are costly, or records from health clinics, which suffer from limited coverage. Crowdsourcing is a proven method for efficient data collection, although data quality may be variable. They will develop electronic data-collection and storage tools and pilot test their crowdsourcing approach in a selected region in Nigeria. Health workers will be trained to administer brief interviews to community members visiting clinics and during outreach programs to document local births and deaths. They will evaluate the performance of their approach and particularly data accuracy by comparing it with data collected by household surveys in the same region.

The idea is to develop an artificial intelligence model capable of simultaneously analyzing data from the Laboratory Information System and from the Hospital Information System. This technology aims to enable the delivery to hospital physicians of a ranked list of antimicrobials that are more suitable to treat infection by multi-resistant microorganism with a focus on newborn and young children.

This project proposes the development of the One Health Brazilian Resistance (OneBR), a curated and integrated genomic database. OneBR will use algorithms based on artificial intelligence to conduct surveillance, diagnosis, management and treatment of antimicrobial resistance (AMR) in the human-animal-environment interface. The goal is for this platform to be used by Brazilian health professionals in diverse settings, particularly within the Unified Healthcare System (SUS).

The project proposes to characterize the resistant determinants of microbial communities from key sources in hospitals, environment and farms to model the dynamics of the flow of antibiotic resistant microorganisms. The goal is to understand how the hospital environment and animal farming affect the ecology of antibiotic resistance movement. The project will rely on a methodology that allows the analysis of genes related to antibiotic resistance in a complex microbial community derived from specific samples instead of culture based methods for AMR identification.

The project aims to monitor AMR in microorganisms of the urinary tract and correlate it with the genetic determinants of resistance in animal enterobacteria. The study results will be disseminated in order to inform potential changes to guidelines regarding selection of the appropriate antimicrobials first-line treatment for urinary tract infections (UTI).

The project will develop a cellulose filter containing immobilized DNA aptamers, molecules that bind to a specific target molecule, that act as specific and high affinity probes for the uptake and retention of antibiotic molecules present in effluents. Nowadays, the removal of antibiotic residues from effluents is mainly based on chemical processes and physical methods that require expensive technologies and costly maintenance. The success of this project will represent a wastewater treatment option that is low-cost and environment-friendly.

The main goal of the project is to develop and explore an innovative measure of gestational age - "potential pregnancy days lost" (PPDL) - to produce evidence of its association with maternal and child health, morbidity and mortality in the short, medium and long term. The indicator also aims to convince women and policy makers about the need to promote less interventions and "harm-free care" during pregnancy.

Seeks to understand the impacts of the Bolsa Família conditional cash transfer on birth outcomes (e.g., birth weight, gestational weeks, etc). The proposed design will disentangle the measured effects into two components: one that is associated to the cash transfer; and another related to prenatal care assistance. Moreover, this strategy will allow the researchers to determine the window of opportunity where CCT interventions exhibit highest impacts on birth outcomes, recognizing heterogeneous impacts according to how early in the pregnancy the CCT intervention starts.

Aims to access all 68.3 million living births certificates from Brazil, from 1994 to 2016, and compare them with breastfeeding policies in all Brazilian hospitals to assess the impact of the initiatives on infant health. The study also plans to estimate the number of avoidable deaths during this time period, if those initiatives were adopted in Brazil.

The study is aimed at evaluating the effectiveness of Mãe Coruja intervention in reducing low birthweight and preterm birth. By using appropriate statistical methods, the study will use the Cidacs dataset combined with the data from Mãe Coruja program to carry out the quasi-experimental study. With the support of machine learning techniques, the project will also Identify social, economic, geographic and environmental conditions that are associated with the outcomes. The researchers will also build an index of perinatal health risk to inform improvements in targeting populations and the deployment of similar strategies and programs elsewhere in Brazil.

Does air pollution affect the rates of stillbirths, congenital malformations and neonatal mortality? This study aims to answer this question by merging the child health data collected within the 100 Million Brazilian Cohort from Cidacs with high-resolved satellite-derived data on air pollution to establish critical ambient air pollution thresholds for preventing adverse birth outcomes and malformations based on concentrations of fine particles, PM 2.5.

Identifying the preventable causes and performing early risk stratification of pregnant women are instrumental to develop strategies to prevent and reduce preterm birth (PTB). The ability to identify at-risk pregnancies and to enroll women in prevention strategies has been difficult due to complexity of associated risk factors. The study aims to combine different national level data sources to understand the main predictors of PTB and develop a machine-learning-based predictive model to conduct automated risk stratification at the point of care level, integrated with advanced data visualization for clinical decision support.

This research aims to analyze the relationship between a conditional cash transfer program and the child's health, considering two generations of the families and using two different approaches: econometric analysis and data mining algorithms. By analyzing the long term impacts of Bolsa Familia program on future generations' health performance, the project will investigate if a child who was born in a family whose grandparents received the cash transfer is in better health conditions than a similar child born in a family whose grandparents did not receive the same benefit.

Anna Casalme of Novelly in the U.S. will develop a mobile phone application that combines young adult fiction about social issues with learning tasks and international discussion forums to encourage young people to become global citizens and spark their interest in issues such as gender equality and health. Building on their existing program, they will design and develop the application with specific features, add one novel, and pilot test it, before refining the design and opening it to the public. After three months, they will evaluate their approach by collecting user data such as number of users, their reading progress, and participation in discussion groups.

Eric Dawson of Peace First Inc. in the U.S. will develop a digital platform that provides tools, online mentors, resources, and funding to help young people aged between 13 and 25 in the Middle East solve critical issues in their communities. Their Youth Challenge Platform approach has already shown initial success for over a hundred projects proposed and run by international youth in the U.S. They will adapt their platform for the Middle East by including different languages and tools, particularly to foster cross-cultural collaborations. They will partner with youth organizations in five to 10 Middle Eastern countries and recruit 50 teams of young people who are interested in solving problems related to the UN sustainable development goals. These teams will be supported through the platform to help them design and implement innovative solutions. Surveys and interviews will be used to evaluate the success of their approach in this region.

Lucy Kathuri-Ogola of Kenyatta University in Kenya will train young people to be outreach youth champions to support local smallholder farming households with low food security in Kenya by teaching them new agricultural practices and building financial and social support networks. They will develop a mobile phone application and training platform and test their approach in selected rural and urban areas in Kenya where many smallholder farming families rely heavily on food relief. Sixteen young people who are leaving university will be recruited as outreach youth champions and intensively trained over three weeks on best agricultural practices, and financial and support services such as farmer saving groups. The trained youths will then each go back into their own communities and work with ten households to improve overall social and economic status. They will use surveys to evaluate the effect of their approach on food security.

Romeo Rodriguez of World Possible in the U.S. will use their massive open online courses (MOOC) to provide teachers with advanced practical skills and tools such as inquiry, teamwork, and self-directed learning, to transform teaching and improve student performance in developing countries. The online course also works offline using their low-cost community hotspot. They will implement the courses over twelve months across 15 offline public middle schools in Guatemala and evaluate its impact on teaching methods and whether this can be enhanced by offering additional three-day in-person training. They will also partner with the Ministry of Education and a respected local university to create a digital certification to further motivate teachers to take the course.

Sara-Christine Dallain of iACT in the U.S. will train refugee men and women to become skilled and empowered teachers who deliver early childhood care and education to support the social-emotional, cognitive, and physical development of children in refugee camps. Over 11 million children have been forced to flee their homes, challenging their ability to reach their full potential. Many lack the tools needed to adapt to the uncertainty of their present and future. Their program, Little Ripples, is a refugee-led, culturally-inspired, and cost-effective early childhood education program. It provides training for teachers to incorporate skills of empathy, leadership, teamwork, and creative problem-solving when teaching pupils to create an environment that fosters peace, imagination, and connection-to-culture for refugee children. The curriculum has been developed by experts and is adaptable to different contexts, and the program can be led and expanded to other regions by the teachers themselves. They will implement and test their program in refugee communities in eastern Chad, Cameroon, and Greece to evaluate the impact on refugee children.

Yen Verhoeven of the Paragon Learning Research Group in the U.S. will create a digital platform for massive open online courses (MOOCs) and a supportive online community of professionals for kindergarten to sixth grade teachers to transform their teaching practices and bring STEM and 21^st century skills to their schools. MOOCs were developed as a means to provide free education to everyone. However, their content is typically restricted to videos and reading with little interactive learning, which is inadequate for teaching life skills such as critical thinking and creativity. And encouraging teachers to adopt new teaching practices requires additional professional support from peers and mentors. To address these issues, they will work with teachers and teaching experts to formulate a new MOOC design containing a variety of instructional resources and free professional development classes and develop a beta version of the online community platform. They will evaluate the course by teaching it to local K-6 teachers and gathering feedback to refine the content.

Hans Brunner of Value Spring Technology, Inc. in the U.S. will build and test an artificial intelligence (AI) tutor to teach the scientific method and critical thinking skills to individual students at their pace and level. All children learn differently but one-on-one lessons are often prohibitively expensive or unavailable. To address this, in collaboration with two non-profit teaching institutions, they will adapt their AI software for education, and build and train an AI tutor, Ali. Ali will be designed to produce natural sounding language to engage students in conversation involving open-ended questions and answers that stimulate critical thinking, which is based on the Socratic method. Students will be taught at their own pace and level of understanding, and Ali will be built to ensure each topic is fully understood before starting the next. They will engage teachers to test and critique their AI tutor approach and to evaluate its teaching performance.

Saurabh Agarwal of Deeper Learning Innovations Private Limited in India will build an interactive, digital teaching platform using advanced data analytics and artificial intelligence algorithms to enable teachers across the globe to more effectively teach life skills to every child. Teaching standards in developing countries suffer from limited access to quality content, restricted teaching methods for teachers, and a lack of ways to transfer knowledge and skills to other teachers and parents. Life skills such as problem solving and communication that are needed to address 21^st century challenges such as health, wellness, and gender equality are far better learned by experience and reflection, rather than reading and lectures. They will build the platform and incorporate life skills modules designed by learning experts and teachers containing multi-lingual and contextualized content for global access, a teacher's discussion forum, and a module designed by teachers to help parents support their child's education. The goal is to make the platform freely available and accessible to all teachers across the globe.

This project will test a sustainable solar oxidation system as a way to remove antibiotic resistant bacteria from wastewater. The hypothesis is that this technology can enable the inactivation of antibiotic resistant bacteria and the elimination of antibiotic resistant genes from effluents in Brazil.

The Augmented Infant Resuscitator (AIR) empowers health workers to achieve and maintain effective ventilation. It provides intuitive real-time, actionable feedback to birth attendants during ventilation. With [email protected] funding, the team will complete the Product Realization Process (PRP) in partnership with Philips Healthcare vital for the global commercialization of the AIR training device. The team will demonstrate resultant impact on skills acquisition, retention and newborn outcomes.

Brandon Kohrt of George Washington University in the U.S. will develop a tool using sensors associated with mobile phones that can identify and monitor young mothers suffering from perinatal depression in low-resource settings in Nepal so that personalized psychological treatments can be provided. The tool comprises a mobile phone for the mother and a small Bluetooth beacon attached to the baby's clothes. It can record location via GPS, the proximity between phone and beacon, and sound. They will build sensor data models that can associate specific activity recorded from the sensors with maternal depression, such as the length of time spent with the baby, the level of vocal interactions, and the frequency of outings. A community advisory board composed of young and older mothers, family members, and health workers will be established to evaluate the approach and help test and refine the tools. They will also co-develop a user-friendly interface with the mothers and health workers so that they can easily access the information and use it to improve their mental health.

Sarah Murray and colleagues of Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health and School of Nursing in the U.S. along with colleagues at the University of Bamako in Mali will develop a group approach to provide better antenatal care to pregnant adolescents in Mali and protect them from common mental disorders such as depression. Over half of adolescent girls in Mali have a child before their 18th birthday, and as a consequence are more likely to live in poverty, be uneducated, and experience violence. Although antenatal health services and support are available, they are limited. To address this, they will develop a group format for more efficient delivery of antenatal mental health care that encourages open discussions and provides social networks and support. This will be done in collaboration with adolescent mothers, their husbands, and health care providers. They will train health care workers to teach relevant coping strategies in a group format using cognitive behavioral therapy techniques, and pilot test their approach on small groups of pregnant adolescents with partners in Bamako, Mali.

Lisa Butler of the University of Connecticut in the U.S. will develop an approach to improve the mental health of pregnant and new mothers between 15 and 19 years old in Botswana that incorporates interactive group sessions mediated by trained community workers, informative text messages, and an SMS-based mental health screening tool. Between 19-25% of women in low- to middle-income countries suffer from depression during pregnancy, which can also have serious effects on the child. In Botswana, there are large numbers of young, single mothers, who lack support and are particularly vulnerable to depression. They will develop the materials and format for their approach with support from a community working group of adolescent mothers and health providers to ensure it is culturally appropriate and addresses their specific needs. They will also incorporate a theoretical model designed to address the triggers and reduce the stigma of mental health disorders. Their approach will be field tested with 80 pregnant adolescents in a traditional village in Botswana to evaluate its feasibility and acceptability.

Tara Hopkins of Mali Health in the U.S. will develop methods to improve vaccination coverage in rural communities in southern Mali by engaging community health workers together with traditional birth attendants who are present during home births. In southern Mali, particularly in rural communities, most children are born at home, so they are not registered with a health clinic or present for critical childhood vaccinations. Local health services have limited funds and resources to manage the health records of all the babies born in their communities, or to follow-up with families regarding the necessary vaccinations. This translates to low vaccine coverage of around 9% in some regions, and increased incidences of deadly infectious diseases. They will pilot the project in three rural health districts and create a quality improvement team in each, consisting of a coach, local health workers, birth attendants, and mothers. The teams will be given tools to engage in a group effort to identify the barriers to timely vaccinations, and generate solutions to test.

Rebecca Dempster of HIAS in the U.S. will develop an online game- and mentorship-based intervention to improve the mental health of refugee adolescent mothers in Kenya that integrates into their daily lives and helps them develop new skills. Digital games can help treat mental health disorders such as depression particularly in young people because they have a natural appeal and are easy to access from home. They will recruit ten young mothers, a psychologist, and software programmers to design a mental health game so that it can be used to identify those with mental health disorders and connect them with counselors, and provides interactive challenges to help treat and protect against those disorders as well as build relevant life skills. They will then train these young mothers to act as mentors to support the online game, and pilot test their approach on a sample of 15 refugee adolescent mothers over three months to evaluate feasibility, acceptability, and effect on maternal depression.

Chiwoneso Tinago of West Chester University of Pennsylvania in the U.S. will partner with adolescent mothers and local health workers in Zimbabwe to create peer-support groups incorporating cellphone-based technology such as the WhatsApp messenger application to provide coping and parenting skills to improve the mental health of young mothers. Young mothers less than 18 years old in Zimbabwe are often socially isolated due to forced marriages and exclusion from school, and therefore have no help when bringing up their children. This leaves them vulnerable to physical, emotional, and mental health problems, which also harms their children. They will hold one-hour focus groups with around 100 adolescent mothers and other community members including health workers and teachers, to identify the important topics and the best set-up for the support group meetings. They will then train community health workers and educators to run the peer-support groups, and evaluate its effect on depression and anxiety.

Gershim Asiki of the African Population and Health Research Centre in Kenya will develop a mobile phone application and centralized electronic database to link birth records with immunizations to increase the coverage of BCG and polio vaccines in newborns in Kenya. Births and immunizations are initially recorded on paper and then transferred to separate electronic databases, meaning that many infants fail to receive the standard vaccinations on time. They have developed an integrated database that collects both birth and immunization data directly from nurses and health workers via mobile phones. They will evaluate the feasibility of their approach by registering around 450 newborns from an urban slum, and train community health workers to register pregnancies, due dates and delivery dates using the mobile phone application. They will monitor the newborns up to two months after birth, and test the effect of their approach on the timeliness of vaccinations.

Jerome Ateudjieu of Meillerur Acces aux Soins de Sante in Cameroon will test whether training community volunteers to record demographic movements and monitor births and immunizations of residents and visitors in their villages can improve timely childhood vaccination coverage in Cameroon. Many health districts in Cameroon have reported outbreaks of vaccine-preventable diseases. One underlying cause is that many people in these regions travel extensively, making it difficult for health facilities to identify newborns that need vaccinating, and to inform parents when and where the necessary vaccinations can be received. They will select 60 villages in the Noun Health District of West Cameroon, and train community volunteers to record the movements and immunization status of infants up to 11 months in their village. These records will be sent by the WhatsApp mobile messaging application to the relevant health facility to identify the children eligible for the next immunization session. The necessary appointments will then be communicated back to the parents by the community worker, who will also inform them of the importance of timely immunization, and encourage pregnant mothers to give birth in health facilities.

Estelle Sidze of African Population and Health Research Centre in Kenya will work with adolescent mothers in Nairobi slums to develop a toolkit of information, skills, and coping mechanisms, to protect their mental health during pregnancy and early motherhood. Many girls in Nairobi slums become pregnant, but have limited knowledge about how to care for a baby, and are often excluded from their homes. They will interview adolescent mothers to find out what harms their mental health during pregnancy, what effect this has on their behavior, and how they try to cope. They will also work with them, and with health workers and community members, to build the toolkit to protect them from these stressors. This toolkit will include providing information, and teaching problem-solving and confidence-building skills. They will test their approach on a sample of 150 adolescent girls who are pregnant or are new mothers using trained adolescent mentors with two delivery methods: organized two-hour meetings with up to ten participants in selected safe spaces; and five-person online discussion groups via the WhatsApp messenger application.