Open Source E-learning Platform for Maternity Healthcare

300,000 users. Learning, without interruption.

One open-source platform, built to train India's maternal healthcare workforce at national scale, with a seamless experience for every login, every session, every lesson.

When Aastrika Sphere set out to build a platform that could scale for hundreds of thousands of learners, Tarento was proud to be the technology partner behind that vision. Today the platform has passed 300,000 users, and that number is the clearest possible measure of what open source, the right architecture and a partnership built on care can deliver in healthcare.

This is the story of how it was built, and how it grew from a few thousand frontline workers to a national maternal health learning platform.

At a glance

• Client: Aastrika Foundation, supported by Nilekani Philanthropies
• Platform: Aastrika Sphere, a digital capacity-building platform for maternal healthcare
• Sector: Healthcare, non-profit, digital public goods
• Technology: Sunbird open-source learning stack, headless back end with a Fusion UI front end
• Tarento's role: End-to-end platform engineering, from launch through to national scale
• Hero outcome: 300,000 learners reached, growing from roughly 8,000 in the first phase

The challenge: training a national healthcare workforce that formal education had left behind

India's maternal healthcare workforce is vast, widely distributed and underserved by formal continuing education. Doctors, nurses, midwives and ASHA (Accredited Social Health Activist) workers across thousands of facilities need ongoing training, yet the options open to them have been fragmented, paid, or simply out of reach for frontline staff.

Aastrika Foundation, the Indian non-profit founded in 2019 by Dr Janhavi Nilekani to widen access to high-quality, respectful maternity care, wanted to close that gap with a single open-source e-learning platform. It had to host content from many expert partners, serve very different user groups, and keep growing alongside the foundation's programmes. Cost, openness and scale all mattered at once. A proprietary learning management system was the wrong place to start.

Why an open-source platform, and why Sunbird

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 single vendor.

The fit showed early. Tarento had already proved the Sunbird stack on country-scale education and healthcare initiatives, and the same pattern carried cleanly into Aastrika's brief: open source, configurable, and ready for national rollout from the outset.

What Tarento built into Aastrika Sphere

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

The first is Sunbird implementation and customisation for an evolving maternal health curriculum, with the platform reshaped repeatedly as the user base and partner mix grew from early pilots to national reach.

The second is a set of healthcare-specific features, including validated credentialing for course certificates, a custom authentication mechanism, and the integration of a Fusion UI front end with the headless Sunbird back end.

The third is a continuous delivery operating model, run as a build-measure-learn loop with regular sprints, so partner feedback and field learning could move into the platform without long release cycles. As the scope widened across more partners, programmes and integrations, the Tarento team grew from three people at the start to more than ten.

Building for 300,000, without interruption

Building for scale is never only about infrastructure. It is about making sure every one of those 300,000 users gets a seamless experience. A learner who is a nurse on a night shift, fitting a module between rounds, cannot be met with a timeout or a failed certificate. That reliability standard, held steady as the user base multiplied, is what turns a pilot into a platform people trust.

That is the standard Tarento holds itself to, and it is why the engineering effort went as much into performance and resilience as into features. The result is a platform that has carried each step up in scale without making the experience worse for the people relying on it.

What the platform offers learners and partners

Aastrika Sphere supports Continuing Nursing Education (CNE) points for nurses, with courses approved by the Indian Nursing Council (INC) and offered free of cost. It hosts content from organisations including UNFPA, the Maternity Foundation, Fernandez Foundation and the White Ribbon Alliance.

More 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. The open-source foundation is what makes this range of partners and programmes possible on a single platform.

The outcome: a climbing curve, not a one-off win

The reach has grown sharply, and the shape of that growth is the real story.

The first phase covered around 18 courses and roughly 8,000 healthcare worker users. By Aastrika Foundation's five-year milestone in 2024, the digital platform had passed 100,000 learners, with around 200 courses, 11,000 learning hours delivered and more than 20 partner organisations contributing content. In-person programmes have trained over 1,500 healthcare workers on top of the digital reach. Today, that learner base stands at 300,000.

From 8,000 to 100,000 to 300,000: each step was carried by the same open-source foundation, reshaped rather than rebuilt as demand grew. Aastrika's stated ambition is to support access to high-quality maternity care for 25 million women a year by 2030, and 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 all line up. A proprietary system would have constrained partner content, user segments and integrations. Sunbird and Tarento's engineering kept the platform open, scalable, and shaped by its users, which is what grew the user base from a few thousand to 300,000 without losing the seamless experience along the way.