Mobile health at critical moments: how bold is global health?

The paper examines the often‐overlooked contextual dimensions of mobile health (mHealth) programs in low- and middle-income countries, it argues that their perceived benefits extend well beyond mere message delivery. Drawing on fieldwork in rural Burkina Faso’s Nouna Health District, the paper finds that both users and implementers hold richly layered, situated expectations ranging from technical advantages and organizational shifts to gender-specific impacts and confidentiality concerns. At the same time, mHealth initiatives face inherent limitations, unable to fully resolve entrenched barriers to maternal care. The study concludes that mHealth benefits and challenges are deeply rooted in local experiences and constraints, calling for interventions that are sensitive to contextual realities and systems-level factors to optimize implementation success.