Liga Inan – Mobile Maternal Health Messaging Network

Liga Inan ('Connecting Mothers') is a mobile-phone maternal and newborn health service launched in 2013 in Timor-Leste by Health Alliance International (now Hamutuk Nasaun Saudavel) and Catalpa International, in partnership with the Ministry of Health, in a country with low fixed connectivity and dispersed rural populations.

The service aims to extend maternal-health information and follow-up to pregnant women and at-risk mothers over basic mobile channels rather than fixed internet infrastructure.

Enrolled pregnant women receive SMS and voice messages timed to their pregnancy stage, while community health volunteers use the same system to track and follow up with at-risk mothers.

A quasi-experimental evaluation (Journal of Global Health, 2019, University of Washington authors) compared an intervention district (Manufahi) with a control district (Ainaro) using baseline (2012, n=581) and endline (2015, n=576) surveys. It found skilled birth attendance and facility-based delivery each nearly doubled (OR 1.9), postpartum care within two days rose roughly five-fold (OR 4.7), and newborn postnatal checks within two days rose over five-fold (OR 5.5); no significant effect was found on antenatal care visit frequency. The Ministry of Health formally adopted Liga Inan as national policy, and by 2020 enrolment had reached its 60,000th mother. Timor-Leste's National Health Institute separately found 64% of surveyed women identified Liga Inan as their primary source of maternal health information.

The evaluation's own authors note that its quasi-experimental, non-randomised design limits causal certainty, and the lack of an antenatal-visit effect suggests the programme worked better for delivery and postnatal behaviours than for visit frequency. As an mHealth service rather than a general digital-literacy programme, its digital-inclusion contribution is specifically about extending health information access over basic mobile channels in a low-connectivity setting.