With their widespread use in the Global South, mobile phones are attracting growing interest from international aid actors and local authorities alike, who are positioning mobile technology as a growth driver and a solution to many social problems. Initiated by giants of the digital industry, these policies are reviving old questions about technological development, the relationship between the market sector and States, and the role of technology in the inequalities between the Global North and Global South. Through a multi-sited ethnography on maternal care in Ghana and India, this Element provides a first-hand look at initiatives that promise to improve poor women's health in the Global South through the use of mobile phones; a field known as Mobile Health or mHealth. Attentive to the way in which these technical objects modify power relations at both international and local levels, this Element also discusses how mHealth transforms care practices and healthcare.

lgli/mobile-for-development.pdf

lgrsnf/mobile-for-development.pdf

Al Dahdah, Marine

Elements in global development studies, S.l, 2022

Cambridge United Kingdom ; New York NY, 2022

United Kingdom and Ireland, United Kingdom

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Cover
Title page
Copyright page
Mobile (for) Development: When Digital Giants Take Care of Poor Women
Contents
Introduction
1 Mobile Health: A ‘Simply Brilliant’ Innovation
1.1 More Than Just a Phone
1.2 More Than Just Healthcare
1.3 Maternal Health, a Productive Sector for mHhealth
2 Key Concepts and Methods for Studying mHealth
2.1 STS, Usage and Discourse Analysis
2.2 Multi-Sited Investigation: Grasping the Dynamics and Anchorage Points of a ‘Global’ Object
2.3 Studying the ‘Most Promising mHealth Project’
3 Global Dependencies and North–South Inequalities
3.1 Blaming the Technical Skills Deficit
3.2 Closing Down ‘Open-Source’ Devices
3.3 Fencing in Interoperability
3.4 ‘Low-Cost’ Technologies
4 Datafication, Data Work and Data Management of Healthcare
4.1 Collecting Big and Small Data for Health in the Global South
4.2 Data Protection and Privacy Issues
4.3 Agents and Objects of Datafication
5 Optimisation and Performance Management of Healthcare Workers
5.1 Optimising Healthcare Management Through Mobile Data
5.2 The Policy of the Carrot and the Stick!
6 Intersecting Technological Inequalities
6.1 The Mobile Phone, an Instrument of Male Domination
6.2 Situating Technological Intersectionality
6.3 The Unequal Caregiver–Patient Relationship
6.4 Disparities in Financial Resources and Access to Healthcare
7 Conclusion and Implications for Future Research
7.1 mHealth as a Biomedical Technology
7.2 A Wealth of Digital Health Objects
7.3 The Political Economy of Digital in the Global South
List of Abbreviations
References
Dedication

2023-10-31