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Paper short abstract:

As FemTech enterprises increasingly ‘disrupt’ sexual and reproductive healthcare provision in Kenya, this paper asks how digital infrastructures, data flows, and commodified ‘reproductive futures’ are imagined and dispersed across Nairobi's tech-ecosystem and informal settlements' networks of care.

Paper long abstract:

The recent emergence of Female Technology (FemTech), a growing digital health market specifically aimed at women’s sexual and reproductive health (SRH), poses novel questions about control and power over women’s bodies – and their respective data. While smartphone apps, wearables, and digital diagnostic devices expeditiously collect, analyse and store personal data, concerns about modes of surveillance, the ownership, and the value of health data become more relevant than ever. FemTech solutions seem particularly attractive for low-resource contexts in which access to healthcare facilities and women’s SRH services remain limited whilst techno-optimism is thriving. Intensified by the COVID-19 pandemic and its exacerbation of SRH inequalities in Sub-Saharan Africa, the pandemic contributed to pervasive shifts to digitalise and privatise healthcare delivery across Kenya - where private enterprises are increasingly filling the void of healthcare provision through increasingly digitised networks of care. This article is based on 8-months of ethnographic fieldwork among HealthTech startups in Kenya’s tech-ecosystem ‘Silicon Savannah’ and healthcare practitioners/patients in private health clinics across Nairobi’s informal settlements in 2020 and 2021. It traces commodification practices targeting healthcare disparities and socio-economic inequalities in a new data-specific context. By drawing attention to capitalist relations of power and their intersection across race, class, and gender, it investigates how data becomes an essential commodity of expansion through processes of extraction. It contributes insights into the creation of novel markets around women’s Bodies of Data and the digital networks of care they circulate in.