Many mobile health (mHealth) projects, typically deploying pilot or small scale implementations, have been undertaken in developing world settings and reported with a widely varying range of claims being made on their effectiveness and benefits. As a result, there is little evidence for which aspects of such projects lead to successful outcomes. This paper describes a literature review of papers from PubMed undertaken to identify strong contributions to execution and evaluation of mHealth projects in developing world settings, and suggests a template for classifying the main success factors to assist with collating evidence in the future.