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- Convenors:
-
Edwin Ameso
(University Leipzig)
Marian Burchardt (University of Leipzig)
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- Chairs:
-
Edwin Ameso
(University Leipzig)
Marian Burchardt (University of Leipzig)
- Discussant:
-
Gift Mwonzora
(University of Free State)
- Format:
- Panel
- Stream:
- Social media, archiving and ‘the digital’
- Location:
- S66 (RW I)
- Sessions:
- Tuesday 1 October, -
Time zone: Europe/Berlin
Short Abstract:
In Africa, a political imperative is shaping the uptake of digital technologies to leapfrog decades-long infrastructural challenges in care trajectories. In this panel, we explore these technologies taunted as enablers for sustainable development as they connect citizens to health services.
Long Abstract:
Digital health technologies have become a core component of health development agendas, notably Universal Health Coverage (UHC) and the aim to reduce health inequalities. Correspondingly, over the past decade there have been massive investments in the digitization of healthcare on a global scale. Nourishing widespread fantasies of infrastructural leapfrogging, many policymakers and experts extol such technical solutions as the idealized panacea for the continent’s economic and administrative problems. For all these reasons, the uptake of digital technologies such as drones, Internet of things (IoT), Artificial Intelligence (AI) has turned into a new political imperative. Nonetheless, little is known about how and in which ways these technologies change access to healthcare on the ground. In this panel, we explore how digital technologies and infrastructures reconfigure access to health services, wherein global technologies fuse with local realities and historical legacies in the Global South to improve lives, create jobs, connect off-the-grid citizens and re-imagine care trajectories. Specifically, we explore how these emerging digital technologies and infrastructures compete, complement and leapfrog historical challenges to provide health as a public good and service from poor countries, often in the wake of unprecedented logistical challenges, labour concerns, and widespread lack of political commitment and subsequent de-investments in healthcare systems particularly in Africa. In this panel, we also aim to explore how digital technologies and infrastructures shape access to life-saving commodities and essential medicines to citizens. We invite papers from a variety of disciplines including sociology, anthropology, geography, political science and international relations.
Accepted papers:
Session 1 Tuesday 1 October, 2024, -Paper short abstract:
This paper is an examination of the multifaceted role of artificial intelligence (AI) in malaria prevention and control within Ghana, addressing current landscapes, challenges, and opportunities while underscoring ethical considerations.
Paper long abstract:
In this paper, I embark on an insightful exploration into the multifaceted realm of artificial intelligence (AI) and its pivotal role in malaria control strategies within the context of Ghana. I present a thorough evaluation of the existing landscapes, challenges, and opportunities, providing a comprehensive understanding of the intricate dynamics shaping the current state of malaria research in Ghana. Despite commendable progress in biomedical research, the persistent threat of malaria demands continued attention. The global landscape is witnessing the burgeoning promise of AI integration in malaria prevention, serving as a catalyst for innovative solutions. The paper dissects the applications of AI in critical domains, encompassing malaria diagnosis, drug discovery, vector control, and epidemiological forecasting. A distinctive facet of this paper lies in its reliance on an illuminating interview with Lucas Amenga-Etego, a distinguished scientist from WACCBIP. By delving into this insightful conversation, the paper scrutinizes the profound influence of AI on intervention and control plans, unraveling layers of strategic implications. Elevating the discourse, the paper accentuates ethical considerations and socio-cultural nuances inherent in the integration of AI into Ghana's healthcare landscape. The imperative need for robust ethical frameworks is underscored, marking a conscientious approach to technology adoption. In a forward-looking culmination, the paper charts the unexplored territories of future potentials, offering sagacious recommendations to policymakers, researchers, and healthcare practitioners. This exploration transcends geographical boundaries, beckoning a collaborative effort to shape a future where the fusion of AI and healthcare not only addresses immediate challenges in Ghana but resonates globally.
Paper short abstract:
My paper is an ethnography of temporalities of Zipline’s drone center in Vobsi, Ghana, exploring how daily delivery practices are shaped by technologies, aiming to satisfy the customer’s needs in terms of facilitating on-time procedures, desired quality and nominal operational outcomes.
Paper long abstract:
Since 2019, the U.S. company Zipline employs autonomous aerial vehicles (i.e., drones) to deliver blood products and other essential medical goods to communities in Ghana. For this purpose, Zipline is operating six distribution centers in Ghana whose catchment areas cover most of the country. The use of drones is supposed to supply areas that are hard-to-reach as well as expected to support the medical supply chains of the Last Mile Distribution scheme which solely rely on ground transportation. Existing research has paid little attention to the role of temporality within the scope of Zipline’s operations, which notably involve emergency deliveries, and how the promise of on-time deliveries structures their daily routines and practices. My paper examines this gap by analyzing manifestations of temporality in Zipline’s distribution center in Vobsi, North East Region, and how these temporalities are shaped by an assemblage of human operators, digital technologies, the West-African seasons, and standard operating procedures. To do so, my paper draws on more than two months of ethnographic research in Zipline’s distribution center in Vobsi in 2022 and 2023, during which I conducted participant observation and extensive semi-structured interviews with fulfillment operators, flight operators, community managers, facility administrators, and support staff. The aim of my research is to explore how daily practices in Vobsi are shaped by technologies, in particular the fulfillment system, and how the use of technologies is intended to satisfy the customer’s needs in terms of facilitating on-time procedures, desired quality and nominal operational outcomes.
Paper short abstract:
Digital living promise to transform and reconfigure healthcare systems and citizens health futures. In Africa, leveraging on digital entanglements notably drones promise not only to reconfigure healthcare systems but usher in a new paradigm of precision public health.
Paper long abstract:
As healthcare systems experience an unprecedented transformative digital revolution, their entanglement with digital health solutions and technologies cannot be overstated. Embracing digitalisation is thought to enable healthcare systems, especially in the Global South, to overcome decades-long infrastructural challenges, improve healthcare access and quality, and drive sustainable development. In Africa, the digital health solutions and technologies have ushered in a digital scramble to redress the continent’s burden of disease and mortality. The centrality of innovative healthcare delivery is thus anchored in digital health solutions and technologies such as drones. As nation-states experiment and invest in these digital health solutions and technologies health futures are rapidly becoming entangled with, and reconfiguring, health access as a public good. With emphasis on efficiency and targeting to optimize resource use, nation-states like Malawi and Ghana are increasingly anchoring these digital technologies towards a new paradigm of precision public healthcare. Drones as transformative strategies for timely access to critical care and novel healthscapes forming new sociotechnical imaginaries. Through drones, rhetoric on precision public health offers health actors technical solutions to complex problems and promises of data-driven futures free of uncertainty, suffering and inefficient use of resources is nurtured.
In our paper, we suggest and develop the concept of “precision public health”. Using ethnographic insights from our research on medical drones in Malawi and Ghana in addressing maternal mortality, lack of access to diagnostic care and vaccines to target populations in remote settings. We explore the rise of precision public health as they reconfigure health in Africa.