Kilkari and Mobile Academy initiatives

• Ministry for Health and Family Welfare launched two new initiatives recently.

ABOUT KILKARI

• ‘Kilkari’ (meaning ‘a baby’s gurgle’), is a centralized interactive voice response (IVR) based mobile health service which delivers free, weekly, time-appropriate 72 audio messages about pregnancy, childbirth, and childcare directly to families’ mobile phones from the second trimester of pregnancy until the child is one year old.
• Women who are registered in Reproductive Child Health (RCH) portal) based on the woman’s LMP (last menstrual period) or the child’s DoB (Date of Birth), receive a weekly call with pre-recorded audio content directly to the mobile phones of pregnant women and mothers with children under the age of one year.
• Kilkari audio messages are present in the form of voice of a fictitious doctor character called Dr. Anita.
• Kilkari Programme is centrally hosted by MoHFW for all the States/UTs and no further investment in the technology, telephony infrastructure or operational costs is required to be borne by States/UTs.
• This service is FREE of cost for States/UTs and beneficiaries.
• The programme is a service integrated with centralized Reproductive Child Health (RCH) portal of MoHFW’s and is the single source of information for this mHealth service.
• Currently Kilkari is under implementation in 18 States / UTs

ABOUT MOBILE ACADEMY

• Mobile Academy is a free audio training course designed to expand and refresh the knowledge of Accredited Social Health Activists (ASHAs) and improve their communication skills via their mobile phones, which is both cost-effective and efficient.
• It is an anytime, anywhere training course that can train thousands of ASHAs simultaneously via mobile phone.
• Mobile Academy is operational in 17 States/UTs except Chandigarh with six languages viz. Hindi, Bhojpuri, Oriya, Assamese, Bengali & Telugu version.