Aanchal – Hindi App to help Breastfeeding Mothers

By Gunjan Srivastava on February 2, 2016 9 Comments / 8884 views

Dear fellow Members,

With all the gratitude, I would like to present an Android app for supporting mothers of newly born babies.

What is this App for?

Aanchal App provides an answer to many questions a breastfeeding mother may have and try to put some light on age-old myths related to the breastfeeding. All the questions and answers are in Hindi and the App can be used in offline Mode.

Why is it needed?

As you all may be aware of the fact that India has a very high Infant Mortality rate (IMR) and World Health Organisation (WHO) suggests that exclusive breastfeeding to newborn for first 6 months can lower the infant mortality rate.

We have a few ladies on our panel who are certified lactation consultants and as per their experience, a new mother faces lots of challenges and given our social structure, it is not possible for her to query her problems or question every time. In our society lots of myths also prevailed related to newborn and mother eg. first milk (Colostrum should not be fed to child, etc. ). This App can be used by Aanganwadi or Asha workers or mothers who have access to a smartphone.

How is it different?

There is no app in the Android play store which caters specifically to the Indian Women. Being in Hindi can be a huge plus point.

This is our bit for Women Empowerment and giving it back to society, If you share our passion for Women Empowerment and want to do your bit to reduce IMR, please pass this info along to a friend/family member who might consider downloading this app and spreading awareness or may be benefitted by this App.

Please like/follow us on facebook and Twitter.

Please give us feedback to improve this App and what additions you would like to see into it.

Edit 11 Feb 2016 :-

We are adding Vaccination Calendar into this App, this will enable mothers to keep track of all of the Vaccines and due dates, we will be adding a description of vaccine and expected effects on the baby.

A notification will be sent to the App user to remind him the due date of Vaccination. In addition, we are also adding the details of Anganwadi food security scheme for child into this app. please let us know if you think of few more additions, that we can push in this version.

With Gratitude

Comments

Gunjan Srivastava

9 Comments

asha chaudhry February 4, 2016, 1:02 pm

hi gunjan,

this is an interesting app! I LOVE THE NAME! and think this is a great initiative – kudos!

quick question – who is the team that’s created the app (you mentioned “our bit” but i didn’t catch which team you represent 🙂

have you reached out to anganwadis and health centres? because in rural india this could be huge.

when i was expecting i used to go to https://www.babycenter.com/ for guidance – i just noticed they have an app as well. do check it out – you might get some pointers!

content-wise – do address issues moms face initially when they start breastfeeding. eg engorged breasts – that would really help very new moms.

(baby center has expert advice like this – https://www.babycenter.com/search.htm?q=engorged+breasts&sa=Search+BabyCenter)

gunjan – i reckon reaching out to your TA is gonna be the most challenging task. how do you plan to do it?

good luck!!
Gunjan Srivastava February 4, 2016, 1:32 pm

Thanks, Asha,

Your encouragement meant a lot for us, we are all female team from a small IT company, who were given task/challenge to develop something that can empower women.

We followed scrum and our team, which consist of a project manager, Developer, tester and designer, brainstormed and zeroed to this idea.

What you see is an MVP and now I am trying hard to spread the word about this app So that it can reach to its TA. I have connected with BPNI and few other organisation to promote this App, this is a completely philanthropic idea and I am using all my spare time to promote this app and connecting with right people.

I am using Social media to promote and few of my friends are the lactation consultant and they appreciated this app and will use it with their users.

I have to dig deeper into how Anganwadi workers and Asha work and how this App can help them.

For the content, I request you to review the whole App, we have tried to touch all the basic and most asked questions. Engorged breast problem is also touched.

I would like to get more feedback like this and what exact contents can be useful to the end users.

Regards and thanks much
asha chaudhry February 5, 2016, 4:03 am

so i’ll keep adding ideas from time to time.

gunjan, i reckon you should start a fb gp of women who are passionate about this cause and who can help reach out to more new/expecting moms in rural india who are your TA.

have you tried approaching someone at the ministry of women and child development?? https://wcd.nic.in/

i have an idea – do approach any faculty of home science in big cities like delhi/mumbai (sndt)/baroda (msu) – they all have a dept of child dev which has access to aanganwadis etc and they would know how to reach out to health workers at a large scale.

some students can take it up as a part of their project work!! let me know if you need a connect in baroda’s faculty of home science. i will get it for you.

pls write to me asha@rodinhood.com regarding this so i can fwd your mail.
asha chaudhry February 5, 2016, 6:40 am

gunjan, i’ve tweeted this mentioning @ManekaSanjay but i don’t know if this is her official twitter handle or not!!
Gunjan Srivastava February 5, 2016, 3:05 pm

Thanks asha,

I retweeted it @manekagandhibjp, both of the twitter handles looked official, this one had more followers, though.

Thanks for all of your directions and help. I am looking forward to feedback on Mobile App.

Warm Regards
Deeti Dave February 8, 2016, 4:17 pm

love the concept Gunjan. Are you providing generic content for one to browse or do you push personlized week/month/trimester wise help/guidance as the pregnancy progresses similar to babtcenter ?

This is great, but what is your revenue model?

If I were you, I’d start with mom and baby related brands and portals.

If I were you, I’d reach out to administrative authorities for this, like Municipal Commissioner and District Collector to reach out to anganwadies, who has authority and budget both to approve such projects. They may cover your development efforts completely or partially, you’d still need to think of month on month revenue also.
Gunjan Srivastava February 9, 2016, 5:01 am

Hi Deepti

Thanks a lot for encouraging words. The App is an MVP and we are providing generic content in QA format, we are thinking to add few more functionalities to support motherhood.

Babycenter is great, but it sometimes lack the Indian touch and sensibility. Honestly, we never thought about any revenue model as this is a philonthropic venture.

Thanks for your advice for connecting with administrative authorities to reach Anganwadi workers, who can be the best medium for us to reach our TA.

I am sure in future we need to think in terms of revenue to sustain.

Warm Regards and looking forward to keeping this discussion going.

Gunjan Srivastava
Deeti Dave February 9, 2016, 5:13 am

My pleasure
Gunjan Srivastava March 3, 2016, 7:34 am
Hi all,

We have pushed a new version of this App to the Google play store.
- App size is reduced very much now.
- Added government schemes for women and children