A review of digital maternal health promotion to optimise access and utilization of care services in sub-Saharan Africa

In sub-Saharan Africa, maternal mortality rates remains high among women as the vulnerable demographics of reproductive age and breastfeeding mothers compared to other parts of the world. The situation is exacerbated by the region’s underperforming healthcare systems. Although digital health interventions have increased since the emergence of COVID-19 pandemic to enhance health promotion in terms of maternal health vulnerability, the access to and utilization of care services, the record of positive impacts remains limited. The objective of this paper was to analyse the status of digital maternal health promotion in supporting female of reproductive age, first-time and nursing mothers to access and utilise maternal healthcare services during their perinatal and postpartum periods in underserved settings of sub-Saharan Africa. A literature review of peer-reviewed publications between 2020 and 2023 was conducted by searching online databases using keywords and filtering the results using a set of inclusion and exclusion criteria. Findings indicate that digital maternal health promotion is increasingly enabling access to hard-to-reach populations, but the utilization of associated care services remains relatively low. Particularly, mHealth and asynchronous audio-visual digital media are critical for delivering maternal health educational content to the targeted populations, including their partners, and are most likely to increase utilization of maternal care services. Digital promotion of maternal health requires multi-stakeholder collaboration to address the limiting socio-economic, cultural and technical factors that determine access to and utilization of care services during the perinatal and postpartum period, if mortality rates are to be reduced towards the sustainable development goal for good health and well-being.