A Wartburg College senior has received funds from the Clinton Foundation to expand the reach of OBaa 2.0, a software application that aims to reduce the maternal mortality rate in Ghana.

Kwabena Owusu-Amoah from Ghana was awarded a $6,000 Clinton Foundation Resolution Grant at the Clinton Global Initiative University conference this month at the University of Miami. The program was founded by former President Bill Clinton. 

The service venture already has connected about 200 expectant mothers in rural villages with doctors in cities hundreds of miles away. The new money will connect up to another 500. It is estimated that about 350 women out of every 100,000 women who deliver die in childbirth in Ghana, with a higher rate in more rural areas.

OBaa 2.0 — OBaa means honorable woman in Ghana — was the brainchild of Owusu-Amoah and Shalom Nwaokolo, a 2013 Wartburg graduate. The duo enlisted the help of their classmates to move the venture forward, and the team, led by Owusu-Amoah, won the $20,000 grand prize at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s Global Startup Workshop last spring. The cash prize came with the opportunity for five team members to live on the MIT campus this summer and network with Boston-based entrepreneurs and MIT alumni.

“It was an amazing opportunity, but a steep learning curve,” said Owusu-Amoah, a biology and economics major. “The team across from us in the incubator was building propulsion systems for satellites. They would go out to NASA to test them. It was challenging, but we did really well. We delivered on all the milestones we had to.”

The team partnered with Ghana Health Service to bring doctors into their fold and Vodafone, a British multinational telecommunications company, to put smartphones in their community health workers’ hands. The trained locals visit with pregnant mothers, upload their observations and the women’s basic health information, and send it on to doctors in the network. Doctors then examine the women virtually and respond with recommendations.

“We have already heard a lot of positive stories from the field,” Owusu-Amoah said. “One that we are very proud of is from the head of the Ghana Health Service who said he was committed to rolling it out across the country.”