Paper short abstract:

This paper is about how healthcare provision in Rwanda is transforming upon the introduction of data driven technologies. It is focusing on digitalising Rwanda’s Community-Based Health Insurance (CBHI) by looking at how data and its technologies are taken up, enacted, and reproduced.

Paper long abstract:

This paper is about how healthcare provision in Rwanda is completely transforming upon the introduction of data driven technologies. It is focusing on digitalising Rwanda’s Community-Based Health Insurance (CBHI) by looking at how data and its technologies -in this context- are taken up, enacted, and reproduced. Healthcare systems in the Global South are rapidly changing due to the introduction of data driven technologies. For instance, the digitalisation of medical health records; the provision of primary healthcare through ‘telemedicine’ and mobile phones; or the general usage of mobile apps and tracking devices to monitor chronic health conditions and/or for the general wellbeing. Scientists from different fields, such as social sciences, the humanities, science and technology, and data sciences have recently developed interest in studying the datafication of healthcare systems. However, most of the research is focusing on the Global North (Minna Ruckenstein and Natasha Schull, 2016). In the African contexts, there has been a handful of studies that focus on the introduction of the data driven technologies and how it transformed the provision of healthcare, with the focus on how people experience these technologies, how healthcare systems are transforming, and what sort of policies, laws, and regulations composed to develop and govern such transformations. I will present an ethnographic case of how the CBHI subscribers pay premiums into a local health fund via an online platform known by Irembo. It is to offer insights on how actors remodel, reboot, and reproduce power structures through the datafication of healthcare.