About

Supporting expectant mothers in Africa through technology

AfricanMothers Inc. works exclusively on digital maternal and child health in Africa. The company was founded in 2022 as a subsidiary of Castalia Co., Ltd.

We build information networks for expectant mothers in the United Republic of Tanzania and the Republic of Côte d’Ivoire, using the smartphones already in their hands. We build tools that let midwives share antenatal records, and let mothers see health information and their own records. Both countries have a high maternal mortality ratio, and that is the problem we work on.

Company information

Name	AfricanMothers Inc.
Founded	7 July 2022
Capital	JPY 2,000,000
Representative Director	Kimiyoshi Yokogawa
Shareholder	Castalia Co., Ltd. (100%)
Head office	8F Dai-3 Toun Bldg, 1-13-10 Shibaura, Minato-ku, Tokyo 105-0023, Japan
Representative office	Dar es Salaam, United Republic of Tanzania

History

July 2022	AfricanMothers Inc. founded as a wholly owned subsidiary of Castalia Co., Ltd.
February 2024	Featured in an NHK documentary
June 2025	Survey in Côte d’Ivoire selected for a METI subsidy
July 2025	Memorandum signed with IIJ, TOPPAN, and Toyota Tsusho
October 2025	Kimiyoshi Yokogawa appointed Representative Director
February 2026	Demonstration in Tanzania selected for a METI subsidy
April 2026	Representative office established in Dar es Salaam

Officer biographies

Kimiyoshi Yokogawa, Representative Director

Yokogawa graduated from the Faculty of Education at Osaka Kyoiku University and completed a master’s course at its graduate school before joining Castalia Co., Ltd. He holds an advanced teaching licence for information studies at upper secondary level. As development director for programming learning materials, he covered everything from curriculum design to content production and marketing. He has also worked abroad. For a JICA baseline study on programming education in Kenya and for JGC Holdings’ education project in Basra, Iraq, he designed the curriculum and produced the learning content. On the Tanzania project run in collaboration with Shionogi & Co., Ltd., he worked on the development of WAAD, the diarrhoeal disease prevention service. In Japan he served as ICT education adviser to the Board of Education of Bandai, Fukushima Prefecture, and led development of a school administration system for the town’s schools. He became Representative Director of AfricanMothers Inc. in October 2025, and concurrently serves as a Director of Castalia Co., Ltd.

Satoshi Yamawaki, Director (Representative Director, Castalia Co., Ltd.)

Born in Tottori Prefecture in 1970, Yamawaki graduated from Kokugakuin University. After working for an English-language correspondence education company, he studied in New York. At Radio Pacific Japan in Los Angeles he produced programmes that combined internet distribution with FM radio. He then served as marketing and sales director at U.S. Japan Business News Inc. in New York, and founded Busium Inc. there in 2000. When the company relocated its head office to Tokyo in April 2005, he moved with it and took charge of its audio content business before leaving in November of that year. He then founded Castalia Co., Ltd. and became its Representative Director.

Yoko Shimpuku, Outside Director (Professor, Graduate School of Biomedical and Health Sciences, Hiroshima University)

Shimpuku has long conducted maternal and child health research in Tanzania, and has served as Vice-Chair of the Young Academy of Japan and as an executive committee member of the Global Young Academy. In 2020 she was the only honouree from Japan named among the 100 Outstanding Women Nurses and Midwives.

Message from the former Representative Director

The message below is from Yasuo Kawabata, who served as Representative Director from the company’s founding in July 2022 until September 2025.

To keep this work going for the next thirty years, someone has to design a business model that can sustain it, and then run at making that model real. My previous work gave me the experience to take on a project this difficult. That is why I stand here.

Castalia, our parent company, has provided mobile learning platforms to support learners worldwide under the motto of solving social problems with IT. To realise the founding wish of making education fall like rain, the company has from the start looked beyond Japan to more than ten countries where population growth makes a shortage of education certain.

Many people assume that social contribution cannot be a business. Some also feel that any hint of money in social contribution work is vulgar. In practice, what gets discussed under the heading of social contribution is almost always donation-funded activity. Over three or five years that can work. Both the donor and the recipient can push forward on goodwill alone. But what we are attempting cannot end after three or five years.

At AfricanMothers we develop and provide smartphone applications aimed at reducing Tanzania’s high maternal mortality. My most important task as representative, though, is to establish a business model that lets us provide these applications to mothers free of charge.

We connect women to support before pregnancy, train midwives, and care for the lives that are born. We then help those lives acquire the skills to survive. This work demands continuity measured in twenty or thirty years. An activity that relies blindly on human goodwill for that long will eventually collapse.

Turning social contribution work into a business takes considerable planning and effort. But precisely because the need is real, and because continuity over the long term is a requirement rather than an aspiration, the work has to become a business. Only as a business can it draw the strength to continue across generations and eras, across ties of blood, differences of nationality, and differences of position. A project no single lifetime can see through is exactly the kind that deserves to be built as a business.

As part of the Castalia group, AfricanMothers will work to become an education brand trusted across borders.