The Startup That Counts the Children the System Cannot See

Every statistic about maternal death in Nigeria is, on closer inspection, a statistic about who gets seen. The country accounts for roughly 28 percent of all estimated maternal deaths worldwide, with a maternal mortality ratio of around 1,047 per 100,000 live births. Behind that figure sits a quieter one: only about 43 percent of births are attended by a skilled provider. The crisis is not only that mothers die. It is that so many of them, and their newborns, are never properly recorded by the system meant to protect them.

HelpMum, a Nigerian healthtech company founded by Abiodun Adereni, has built its work around that blind spot. Its premise is almost stubbornly practical: a child you cannot see is a child you cannot vaccinate, weigh, or save. So the company has spent years building data-driven and increasingly AI-enabled tools to do the unglamorous work of finding mothers and infants at the edges of the health system and pulling them back into view.