Paper short abstract:

Following the Kenyan governments attempts to expand access to healthcare through health insurance, this paper examines critique voiced by citizens and activists about healthcare futures amidst privatization, financialization and digital debt, class inequality, and growing healthcare needs.

Paper long abstract:

In recent years, many African governments have embraced the Universal Health Coverage agenda, which seeks to ensure access to healthcare for everyone “without financial hardship”. Promoted by the WHO and World Bank, such health reforms seem to offer progressive visions of healthcare futures and citizenship, as they seek to expand state responsibility for health insurance and social protection, through free or subsidized healthcare programmes or by experimenting with health insurance. While promoting access to public goods, these interventions are also closely tied to the ongoing privatization of healthcare, the financialization of society through mobile money and digital credit infrastructures, and increasing class differences. Such reforms thus sit firmly within neoliberal forms of governance and development, offering, critics argue, minimal forms of financial protection and healthcare for targeted beneficiaries such as ‘the poor’, and even deepening forms of insecurity and precarity. Based on ethnographic fieldwork and analysis of social media conducted as part of the ERC-funded project, "Universal Health Coverage and the Public Good in Africa", this paper follows critiques voiced by Kenyan citizens, as well as commentators, bloggers and activists, as they discuss the politics of health insurance and universal health coverage, and the futures of public healthcare and public goods in Kenya.