The Campaign

When a woman gets pregnant, everybody – including her – looks forward to the arrival of the new baby. When the baby arrives, he or she becomes the center of attention. Almost always, the health and welfare of one person gets neglected: Mom. This is sadly reinforced by culture in India. To change perception and practice around this, we told the story of a child growing up without her mother, driving the message that a birth of a child should never be the death of a mother. This story propelled the #DontForgetMoms movement by MSD for Mothers to rally healthcare providers, financial institutions, mothers and their families to be aware of the issues around maternal care in India and take serious measures to improve it to end preventable maternal deaths.

Creative Execution

Our initial focus was to convince clinics in three states to get certified and set an example for other regions. A film was produced and launched on social media, telling the story of a doctor whose mother had died following her birth due to the poor maternal care. The film sparked conversation among the public and media and set the stage for the launch of the Manyata, which was attended by the state’s private maternity providers. Actor Shilpa Shetty (a mother who herself endured a difficult pregnancy) engaged in a panel discussion and helped drive urgency on the issue. We advocated, educated, trained, assessed and certified nearly 300 local maternity providers. We created a website, FAQs, and leaflets to inform private facilities about Manyata. We also engaged with financial institutions and convinced them to offer incentives to providers to pursue Manyata certification and be part of the #DontForgetMoms movement.

We generated 100 earned media placements, many of which promoted our film, which was viewed 2.3M+ times and reached more than 5.1 million users on Facebook alone. Website visits rocketed to 30,000 within a week. #DontForgetMoms became a movement as healthcare providers signed up for Manyata. To date, nearly 300 private maternity facilities have already been certified. This means that by the end of 2018, 100,000 mothers would have given birth in a Manyata-certified facility. Most importantly, mothers and their families are making conscious decisions to seek treatment from Manyata-certified facilities. In the wake of the campaign’s success, the Indian government is now in talks with MSD for Mothers to help train public health providers in 27 of 29 states — a move that will potentially save millions of mothers’ lives.

PR was used to raise awareness and instigate action among private healthcare providers, the government and civil society to improve the state of maternal care in India. Stakeholder feedback inspired our strategy: to develop a certification system for healthcare providers to ensure they meet WHO standards. This programme saw us advocating, training, assessing and certifying nearly 300 maternity facilities. Financial institutions developed incentives for providers to get certified and the government have set in motion plans to expand Manyata to public hospitals across India. By the end of this year, 100,000 Mothers will give birth in a Manyata-certified facility.

Our strategy was to inspire and incentivise private healthcare providers to improve the quality of their maternal care services so that women who would otherwise die wouldn’t because they would now have access to better facilities. Inspire: We sparked conversations among Indian civil society about maternal care with an impactful, perception-shifting story told on video. Incentivise: We partnered with FOGSI (a professional federation of 33,000 gynecologists across India) and Jhpiego (an international maternal health non-profit) to develop a certification system in which healthcare providers had to undergo a 6-month capacity building program to hone critical skills based on the World Health Organization’s Safe Childbirth Checklist and adopt 16 clinical standards in their operations. We named the certification system MANYATA after the Hindi word for “mother” (Ma) and “authorized” (Manyata).