Open Source E-learning Platform for Maternity Healthcare

Client overview: Aastrika Foundation, supported by Nilekani Philanthropies

Aastrika Foundation is an Indian non-profit working on access to high-quality, respectful maternity care for every childbearing woman in India. It was founded in 2019 by Dr Janhavi Nilekani and is supported by Nilekani Philanthropies. Its work spans three programmes: Aastrika Sphere, the digital capacity-building platform; the National Midwifery Training Institute partnership with the Government of Karnataka and UNICEF under the Nurse Practitioner in Midwifery (NPM) programme; and Aastrika Midwifery Centre, a clinical centre of excellence in Bengaluru.

The challenge: capacity building for midwives, nurses and ASHA workers at country scale

India's maternal healthcare workforce is large, distributed, and underserved by formal continuing education. Doctors, nurses, midwives and ASHA (Accredited Social Health Activist) workers across thousands of facilities need ongoing training, but the existing options are fragmented, paid, or out of reach for frontline workers.

Aastrika wanted to address that gap with a single open source e-learning platform that could host content from multiple expert partners, work for very different user segments, and grow with the foundation's evolving programmes. Cost, openness and scale all mattered. A proprietary LMS was the wrong starting point.

Why Sunbird was the right open source learning platform

Tarento brought a track record on Sunbird, the open source learning and digital public goods stack incubated by EkStep Foundation and used by several national-scale programmes in India. Sunbird gave Aastrika a modular, modifiable foundation that could be shaped around midwifery and maternal health content without locking the foundation into a vendor.

That match was visible early. Tarento had already proved the Sunbird stack on country-scale education and healthcare initiatives, and the same pattern translated cleanly to Aastrika's brief: open source, configurable, ready for national rollout.

What Tarento built into Aastrika Sphere

Tarento delivered the technology build and ongoing platform engineering for Aastrika Sphere from launch through to its current scale. The work has covered three layers:

• Sunbird implementation and customisation for an evolving maternal health curriculum, with the platform reshaped as the user base and partner mix expanded from initial pilots to national reach.
• Healthcare-specific platform features, including validated credentialing for course certificates, a custom authentication mechanism, and integration of a Fusion UI front end with the headless Sunbird back end.
• Continuous delivery operating model, set up as a build-measure-learn loop with regular sprints so partner feedback and field learning could move into the platform without long release cycles.

The Tarento team scaled from 3 people at the start to over 10 as the platform's scope widened across more partners, programmes and integrations.

Platform features: CNE points, INC-approved courses and partner content

Aastrika Sphere supports Continuing Nursing Education (CNE) points for nurses, with courses approved by the Indian Nursing Council (INC) and available free of cost. The platform hosts content from organisations including UNFPA, the Maternity Foundation, Fernandez Foundation and the White Ribbon Alliance. Recent additions include a competency-based capacity-building rollout in Uttar Pradesh through the E-Kshamata app, in partnership with UP-TSU, and a long-running collaboration with Manyata for Mothers and FOGSI on training against the 16 Manyata Clinical Standards.

Outcome: from a few thousand learners to a national platform

The platform's reach has grown sharply. The original engagement covered around 18 courses and roughly 8,000 healthcare worker users in its first phase. By Aastrika Foundation's five-year milestone in 2024, the digital platform had surpassed 100,000 learners with around 200 courses, 11,000 learning hours delivered, and 20+ partner organisations contributing content. In-person programmes have trained more than 1,500 healthcare workers on top of the digital reach.

Aastrika's stated ambition is to support access to high-quality maternity care for 25 million women annually by 2030. The platform built with Tarento is one of the engines designed to get there.

Why open source matters for digital public goods in healthcare

Aastrika Sphere shows what open source healthcare e-learning looks like when the technology choice, the partner ecosystem and the funding model are aligned. A proprietary LMS would have constrained partner content, user segments and integrations. Sunbird and Tarento's engineering kept the platform open, scalable and shaped by the people using it, which is what eventually moved the user base from thousands to six figures.