Aparna Hegde

Founder

Founder of ARMMAN

Aparna Hegde is the founder of ARMMAN [1], an Indian non-profit working on healthcare and women & children from Mumbai.

Aparna Hegde is an Indian urogynaecologist and the founder of ARMMAN, a non-profit organisation that uses mobile telephony to deliver maternal and child health information to women in India and to train frontline health workers.

She founded ARMMAN in 2008 after her obstetrics and gynaecology residency at a public hospital in Mumbai, where she witnessed deaths and injuries in pregnancy and childbirth that she considered avoidable. ARMMAN works in partnership with state and national government health services and with other non-governmental organisations, and has become one of the largest mobile health programmes in the world.

Career

Hegde is an associate professor of urogynaecology and heads the department of urogynaecology and pelvic reconstructive surgery she established at Cama Hospital, attached to Grant Medical College in Mumbai. She has published extensively on pelvic floor imaging using two- and three-dimensional ultrasound and has held research funding from the United States National Institutes of Health.

ARMMAN, which she founded in 2008 and where she is chair and managing trustee, sends stage-based voice and text messages on pregnancy and infant care to women who have limited access to health infrastructure, and runs training programmes for community health workers. The organisation reports having reached more than 24 million women and trained more than 170,000 health workers across states in India.

During the COVID-19 pandemic ARMMAN ran virtual clinics offering free tele-consultations to pregnant women and children, and used automated messaging to reach women in Mumbai's informal settlements.

Hegde has spoken as a TED Fellow on the use of mobile technology in maternal health.

Recognition

Hegde was named an Ashoka Fellow in 2021. In the same year Fortune placed her fifteenth on its list of the World's 50 Greatest Leaders. She has also received NITI Aayog's Women Transforming India Award and the MIT Solve Elevate Award.[2][3][4][5]

ARMMAN

ARMMAN is a Mumbai-based nonprofit using mobile technology plus health workers to reduce maternal and child mortality — through programmes like Kilkari (stage-based voice messages for mothers) and Mobile Academy (training for ASHAs), run at national scale with governments.

ARMMAN reports the following, on its own site: