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.