Male Partner Engagement in Family Planning SMS Conversations at Kenyan Health Clinics

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Date
2018Author
Perrier, Trevor
Harrington, Elizabeth K.
Ronen, Keshet
Matemo, Daniel
Kinuthia, John
John-Stewart, Grace
Anderson, Richard
Unger, Jennifer A.
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Show full item recordAbstract
Maternal health outreach and engagement is a common goal of
mobile health (mHealth) projects for development. Male partners
of pregnant and postpartum women are known to be important
influences on their health behavior. This paper presents a novel
extension to previous HCI4D research by exploring how to engage
male partners in SMS-based family planning conversations. First,
we explore design considerations for inclusion of male partners
in an existing semi-automated bidirectional SMS platform. A 12-
month randomized controlled trial of a family planning counseling
SMS program was conducted in western Kenya using our system.
A total of 260 pregnant women and 101 of their male partners were
enrolled in the system. We analyze enrollment and usage data from
this trial to compare baseline technology use and demographics of
mothers and their male partners. Our findings demonstrate significant
technology gender divides in the study population. Finally, we
explore how both the mothers and their male partners interacted
with the SMS system through an analysis of over 11,500 messages.
We conclude that it is feasible to include rural Kenyan men in
an SMS-based family planning discussion program and that their
inclusion does not dramatically affect the mothers’ engagement