The 2020 Innovation call, launched by UNFPA partnering with the World Food Programme (WFP) Innovation Accelerator, received nearly 65 submissions from teams around the world. Equatorial Guinea was one of the 9 winners, following a competitive process which included a multi-stage review process by an UNFPA interdisciplinary group, specialists, and finally panel interviews by UNFPA and WFP.

The Equatorial Guinea team is now ramping up preparations for a new and agile prototyping process, to make the seed-project “Angels on Call” a high tech solution with potential to enhance maternal and neonatal mortality reduction in Equatorial Guinea, and around the world.

The idea of creating a technological solution that could help doctors, midwifes and other births attendants often working in very challenging conditions born from the field experience of the ongoing Maternal and Neonatal Mortality Reduction Project, explains Maria Teixeira, the Project Coordinator: “After training the health professionals in EmoNC, with the support of the Puerta de Hierro University Hospital Obstetric Simulation Center in Spain, we were requested by the trainees to not let them alone and continue supporting them. This is when we understood we needed to innovate in order to provide the support all these professionals request, especially the ones that are working in remote areas, sometimes alone or with very few expert support”.

The Maternal and Neonatal Mortality Reduction Project is being implemented by UNFPA together with the Ministry of Health and Social Welfare (MoHSW) of Equatorial Guinea and Noble Energy, an oil company. The UNFPA Equatorial Guinea Resident Representative, Mr. Mady Biaye, has no doubt that this was only possible because this project has innovation as its backbone. “The UNFPA-MoHSW-Noble Energy partnership is the first of its kind at global level, for UNFPA and Noble Energy, therefore we are innovating since we have started this project”, Mr. Biaye says. “This is only possible due to Noble Energy continued support”, he emphasizes.