Digital Entanglements: Medical Drones in African Healthcare Systems

Abstract

The intensified scramble for the digitalisation of healthcare across Africa, coupled with the general drive for digital economies, has ushered in digital health innovations that are reconfiguring national discourses on humanitarian and development contexts. Through these innovations, imaginaries of health have become entangled with aspirations for universal health coverage (UHC) and the actualisation of the health-related sustainable development goals (SDGs). Among these innovations, drones promise to leapfrog and transform conventional African healthcare systems, which have suffered from structural bottlenecks for years, offering citizens on the margins of care critical biomedical gazes. By using drones, African states hope to improve revenue collection, curb corruption, redress health insecurities and deliver life-saving medicines, vaccines and laboratory diagnostics through a last-mile distribution schedule. Ethnographic fieldwork from 2022 to 2023 in Ghana and Malawi on the use of drones found distortions to the health workforce, disruptions to health work, and a pervasive internal brain drain, all exacerbating health-worker shortages. This paper explores how drones are reconfiguring health work and its available labour force in practice amid persistent shortages of health-workers.

Biographical Note

Edwin Ambani Ameso (SFB 1199, Leipzig University, Germany)

A medical anthropologist with an interest in public and global health, he studied at the University of Nairobi, the University of Aarhus and the University of Oslo. He now works as a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Leipzig.
He researches on “off-the-grid”: Infrastructures, processes of spatialization, and drones in Africa. His areas of research include health insurance, social protection and welfare, digital health technologies, infrastructures of care.