Digital Wave in the Indian Ocean: How Digital Technology Shapes Healthcare in India and Africa

• In Event: Global Medicine from the South? Emerging Markets and Indian Ocean Medical Worlds - II

Abstract

With the widespread use of mobile phones in the Global South, digital tools are attracting growing interest from international aid actors as well as local governments ; positioning digital technology as an essential driver of economic growth and an obvious solution to many social problems. Sub-Saharan Africa and India are particularly relevant for analyzing the transformations engendered by the use of digital technology for health in the Global South. As major sites of technological change, they represent both huge digital markets in the Global South while being particularly unequal; socio-economic and gender inequalities conditioning the access and use of digital technologies. For these reasons, they constitute relevant observation sites for the proliferation of digital technologies, but also the shortcomings associated with them. Moreover, they offer an interesting perspective on the Indo-African technological collaborations that carry digital health policies. Indeed, these deployment zones are not only permeable but they also influence each other. Through the study of a global mHealth program deployed in Ghana and India, this paper analyzes how digital technology organizes specific relations between public health systems, beneficiaries and an unavoidable third party: digital tehnology providers. Indeed, as they are initiated by multiple actors from the digital economy, such digital health policies revive old questions about technological development, relations between the market sector and states, and the role of knowledge and techniques in inequalities of health. Finally, it also illustrates the way in which digital technology inscribes profound "global forces" in local sites across the Indian Ocean.

Author

• Marine Al Dahdah, French National Centre for Scientific Research (CNRS)