Short Abstract

Across Africa, health care is being datafied—through digital records, surveillance systems, biometric IDs, drone logistics, telemedicine, and AI. This panel examines the infrastructures, data politics, and everyday practices of health datafication, across the continent's many digital prisms.

Long Abstract

Digital technologies are rapidly restructuring health care across Africa—from electronic patient records and disease surveillance systems to biometric identification, drone logistics, telemedicine, mobile health apps, and AI-assisted diagnostics. Yet the infrastructures, data flows, and power relations that this datafication generates remain underexamined, especially in resource-constrained settings where their effects are most consequential.

Approaching health datafication as a prism, this panel asks what these technologies make visible, what they obscure, and whom they serve. Digital patient records illustrate the broader dynamic: once datafied, bodies become circulating "data-doubles," detached from local clinical settings and selectively linked to geographically distant actors—pharmaceutical companies, research consortia, startups, and platform corporations. But the same questions extend across the digital health field.

How do digital health technologies reorganize the spatial architecture of care, localizing patients while mobilizing their data across borders? When does datafication tip into data extractivism or "data colonialism," and when does it rationalize and strengthen medical planning? How do national digital health strategies, donor-funded systems, and competing technical standards reshape already fragmented health systems? And how do clinicians, technical staff, and patients adopt, contest, repurpose, or work around these tools in everyday practice?

We invite contributions from science and technology studies, sociology, anthropology, geography, data and platform studies, design, and policy research, including work bridging academia, activism, and technical practice. Comparative and single-country studies are equally welcome. By examining health datafication through African prisms, the panel illuminates both the many "digital Africas" being produced and the infrastructures, inequalities, and imaginaries that accompany them.

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