frog design announced a collaboration with UNICEF as the organization’s lead design and innovation partner on Project Mwana, a major mHealth initiative to improve maternal and infant health and welfare in peri-urban Malawi and rural Zambia. The immediate goal of the project is to leverage mobile technologies in innovative ways to significantly increase mothers’ visits to clinics for ante and postnatal care by January 2012.

Working closely with UNICEF’s Innovation Team, frog will donate its services pro-bono to develop appropriate and sustainable mobile systems that will be able to communicate critical information on clinic locations, availability of services, delivery of results, the importance of visiting clinics and more, to the people who need this information most.

Supporting this partnership, frog together with its parent company Aricent, also announced the launch of «Mobile Mandate,» a multi-year investment to tap into the power of mobile technology for social innovation projects in areas such as health, education, energy, and economic well-being. Bringing together deep experience in mobile innovation and design for social good, Mobile Mandate will enable frog and Aricent to connect NGOs, designers, technology companies, and social entrepreneurs in the field, building scalable collaboration models that create high-impact solutions together with network operators, device manufacturers, and application developers.

Mobile Mandate will combine frog and Aricent’s ongoing social innovation programs that center on mobile technologies including Project Masiluleke, a groundbreaking effort to tackle the HIV epidemic in KwaZulu Natal, South Africa that has reached over 800 million people.

Additional elements of the platform include support for micro-programs. To guide all commitments and ensure the effective measurement of impact, Mobile Mandate will be overseen by a Board of Advisors that will include frog and Aricent executives as well as clients and industry experts.