Zimbabwe has a fairly developed health-care delivery system that is served by public and
private hospitals at district, provincial and national level. The public health-care system is the
largest provider of health-care services and caters for the majority of the population but this is
done in a resource-restricted context, typical of a developing context. In this context, this
research sought to establish the potential of mHealth Technologies in Zimbabwe’s maternal
health sector using Parirenyatwa and Harare hospitals as case studies. The reviewed body of
knowledge, which was largely a comparative assessment of mHealth technology adoption in
developing countries, indicated that the full adoption of the prevailing eHealth strategy in
Zimbabwe remains hamstrung by the slow pace of policy implementation. This is a qualitative
study and data was collected with unstructured interviews. Purposive and snowball sampling
were used to recruit the participants. The gathered data was analyzed through content and
thematic analysis. Four broad themes emerged from the primary data collected during the
interviews and these include: trends in information dissemination in Zimbabwe’s Public Health
System; information needs for expectant women and midwives; the prevalence of ICT use in
Zimbabwe’s Public Health System, and mobile technology use in the maternal health sector
in Zimbabwe. The research was able to establish that while there is a high proliferation of
smartphone use among most expectant women, this has not translated into their use for health
information-related purposes. Furthermore, the situation is not helped by the over-emphasis
on internal ICT adoption by health centers rather than a patient-centric approach to ICT use.
A limitation for this study was its focus on two hospitals which means its findings cannot be
taken as a conclusive reflection of Zimbabwe’s entire maternal health sector. The research
was able to conclude that hospitals need to become perpetual learning organizations on
mHealth technology use.