Paper short abstract:

Among foreign volunteers in Tanzanian health facilities is a growing number of volunteers from other African countries. What can engagements within the gaps in Global Health tell us about emerging global connectivities and their politics?

Paper long abstract:

Somewhat neglected within existing Global Health literature, one phenomenon has attracted significant attention among (aspiring) health professionals largely from the Global North: clinical volunteering in the Global South. While gaps in Global Health priorities are a 'push' factor for mobile actors to travel, some health professionals in the Global South look to clinical volunteers as a prospective means of attending to the very scarcities that attract foreigners to these places. Drawing from ethnographic data collected in Tanzania over four field seasons since 2008, this paper considers established as well as emerging shifts in the connectivities that characterize global health volunteering. Among the foreign volunteers crowding the neglected wards and clinics of Tanzanian health facilities is a growing number of volunteers from other African countries. Foreign African volunteers, like their peers from the Global North, anticipate that these experiences in Tanzania will bolster their professional trajectories in medicine or global health back home or abroad. As Tanzanians host foreign volunteers in hopes of forging cooperations to address prevalent scarcities in their health facilities, I ask: what new assemblages are emerging or aspired to in the gaps of Global Health priorities? What can engagements within the gaps in Global Health tell us about emerging global connectivities and their politics? What is at stake when the scarcities of medical systems become commodities for mobile actors within both the Global North and the Global South? Ultimately, what (in)equalities, possibilities and constraints emerge within the gaps of the formal Global Health enterprise?