Awêkind is an app that is preparing for piloting and wider adoption within NHS maternity and postnatal services across the UK.
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Awêkind
Black and South Asian parents are twice as likely to lose a newborn. Awêkind is addressing what postnatal care has left out.
In the UK, Black and South Asian parents are twice as likely to experience neonatal loss, and postnatal care remains one of the most criticised aspects of maternity services. The absence of culturally relevant education has been linked to higher rates of parental stress, anxiety, and postnatal depression, alongside poorer outcomes for babies. Closing this gap is an urgent priority under the NHS Core20PLUS5 agenda and the Saving Babies' Lives initiative, yet the resources to do it have been largely absent.
Dr. Aiesha Alexander is a paediatrician and a mother who saw the gap not just in the data, but in the families she worked with. On a mission to make postnatal care culturally inclusive, she built an app called Awêkind to support parents from diverse communities so they can honour their cultural practices in a safe and evidence-based way.
“I built Awêkind to give parents what standard postnatal education has consistently failed to provide to families of diverse communities. Awêkind has resonated with more people than I could have imagined, and I'm deeply grateful.”
Awêkind delivers evidence-based, culturally inclusive guidance through the postnatal period, covering breastfeeding, bathing, weaning onto a diverse diet and cultural postnatal rituals. The content is tailored specifically to families of colour, so that they can find reliable, science-backed information that works with their cultural practices.
Aiesha would like her app to be as close to a book as possible so parents look after their babies with confidence, from the small everyday things to recognising when they need to visit the hospital.
She is now preparing for piloting and wider adoption within NHS maternity and postnatal services across the UK.
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FOUNDER
Dr. Aiesha Alexander
Paediatric resident | Founder Awêkind | NHS Clinical Entrepreneur
Dr. Aiesha Alexander is a paediatric resident in the West Midlands whose clinical work and personal experience converge in a single conviction: that better supported parents raise healthier children.
After becoming a parent and navigating a postnatal period she describes as isolating and underserved, she recognised a gap the data confirms. Parents of colour are disproportionately underserved in postnatal care, and the culturally relevant resources to address that are largely absent. She built Awêkind to change that.
