When Kenyan nursing graduate Ruth Apondi Omondi created Smart Mama as a simple telemedicine platform in 2024, she knew she was bridging a critical gap in maternal care.
The 24-year-old launched the m-Health service in Nairobi to give pregnant people the reliable information they need to make better health decisions on their journey to childbirth.
Apondi Omondi’s August 2025 win of the Top 40 Under 40 Women award in the social Impact category from the Kenyan news publication Business Daily marked a milestone in her lifesaving work.
Healthcare access on the phone
“It’s special to everyone because mothers are very important. We bring life, and it’s good that I’m able to impact them and my efforts were recognised. Inasmuch as we’re still in the early stages. This is a big award. As we progress, there’s going to be more of Smart Mama, yes,” she told Bird.
Smart Mama is a mobile health platform that Omondi created in 2024. The idea, she said, is simple: to bring trusted, clinically accurate information directly to mothers. Into their phones, homes and virtual conversations.
“A client contacts me via my social media pages. Then I ask them what trimester they’re in or how many weeks. I gather their history, and then I show them the list of topics per session that I have. I call that list smart mama health topics,” she added.
National reports from Kenya’s Ministry of Health show that many lower-level facilities lack the capacity for life-saving obstetrics care. Inaccessibility to skilled care and critical information still places women at unnecessary risk.
Smart Mama steps directly into that gap: not as a replacement for clinics, but as a bridge. A way to help women recognise danger early. To understand their pregnancies, and know when to seek help. The platform’s accessibility is a major advantage.
Easily accessible, saves lives
“So I chose simple technologies like Google Meet and WhatsApp because one, they are easily accessible. I mean, I have Google Meet and WhatsApp on my phone. Again, they are cheaper compared to now having to build an entire app or an entire platform on my own. I think it is going to take a longer time, so just start with whatever I have,” she said.
Through WhatsApp, Google Meet, and private consultations, Omondi guides women across different stages of pregnancy. She is creating a safe space for questions and anxieties. Her early client base was small — about 25 women whom she followed closely. But her community reach is wider through group forums. She measures the impact of Smart Mama through the many mothers who message her after delivery.
“I am satisfied when I see a mother holding a baby… When I get their feedback and experiences… I know I am making an impact,” she said.
Omondi was a nursing student at Kenyatta University (an experience chronicled in a book she later wrote called Trials and Triumphs: Chronicles of a Student Nurse). That was when she came up with the idea for Smart Mama. In April 2024, she participated in a university hackathon. Her group didn’t win, but something more important happened: she walked away with a sharpened sense of problem-solving and the seed of an idea.
Nursing meets innovation
“I figured if a woman gets this information — if she learns something new — she’s going to be smart. So: smart and mama. Smart Mama.”
It was her experiences making rounds at Pumwani Maternity Hospital, the largest in the country, during her final year as a student nurse in 2024 that made her appreciate how great the needs were in maternal care. The hospital was consistently crowded, under-resourced.
“The last reported figures is that we have around 23 nurses for 100, 000 [patients]. So when you translate that, and start looking at these facilities that are taking care of these mothers, like the labour ward, the clinic, the antenatal clinic where these mothers go, you may find that there is one person,” says Jacqueline Kituku, a lecturer at Kenyatta University where she teaches about maternal health care.
“So, what does that mean? It means that one person or just a few have a burden of taking care of very many patients.”
Preventable tragedies
Although women made it safely to Pumwani, Omondi felt they often left the hospital fully grasping what to watch out for, what was normal, or when something serious might be wrong. She recalled the incident of a woman dying in childbirth.
“A woman came to our maternity ward with signs of preeclampsia. It is a common condition that affects pregnant people and it’s a life threatening one. Most of the time the signs are missed. It is characterised by swelling of the face and limbs. Something which one might associate with normal pregnancy,” Omondi explained.
“Her pressure was through the roof. She did not know about it. She had stayed home thinking that’s how pregnancy is. When we took her blood pressure, we saw it was high. But then a couple of minutes later she started convulsing.”
Minutes after her blood pressure was taken, the woman began convulsing. What had been preeclampsia had now progressed to eclampsia, characterised by seizures. The patient needed a Caesarean operation.
“When it gets to that point, it is usually a matter of life and death. And remember here we have two lives. We had to act quickly. Time was not on our side, of course, but she didn’t survive. The baby is the one who survived, she was well. And this is why I usually focus on the health education part,” she said.
Interactive healthcare at your fingertips
Omondi realised that she wanted to do more than nursing in a hospital to meet the needs. She decided to use mobile and digital tech to reach more women. That’s when she began developing Smart Mama. Through Smart Mama, she could reach pregnant people long before they walk into a clinic.
At first, she used her social media pages to talk with expectant mothers. She as gathering their history, asking what trimester they were in, and walking them through what she called “Smart Mama health topics”.
She began to host Google Meet sessions every Sunday, speaking broadly on reproductive health.
“October was Breast Cancer Awareness Month. So I would leverage on such awareness strategies and prevention measures to talk to women.” she said.
What began as improvised virtual education soon became something larger. However, the work isn’t without challenges.
“I’ve had a client come thinking we were a clinic,” she said.
Blurring the lines of digital divide
“She expected curative services. When she realised it was online, her expectations weren’t met, and she went somewhere else.”
It taught Omondi an early lesson about clarity, trust and the gap between what digital platforms promise and what users assume. Her vision for Smart Mama is clear: a full telemedicine platform offering educational content vetted by nurses, virtual consultations, and peer-support communities. For her, every message, every session, every small community she builds is part of a determined shift.
“What I want to do is virtual care before anything becomes catastrophic,” she said.
In her hands, a phone is not just a device. It is a lifeline, one that may help rewrite the pregnancy story for mothers who have been left too long in the dark.
- Bird Feature stories
