Health at her fingertips: development, gender and empowering mobile technologies

Abstract

This paper examines ‘mobile health’ or ‘mHealth’ programs that are using mobile phones to improve maternal health in the developing world. Whereas its implementers present mobile health as a neutral, universal, accessible and ‘smart’ empowering technology for women, we will question this empowering effect and analyze how the device transforms gender inequalities on the ground. To this end, we will use empirical data collected on a global mHealth program deployed in Ghana and India. Informed by gender, post-colonial, science and technology studies, we offer a critical analysis of these new devices using mobile phones to ‘empower’ women in the Global South. This multisite analysis highlights the gender gap and male domination in accessing mobile phones in rural India and Ghana. It also reveals how mHealth devices can negate the multifactorial dimension of gender and health inequalities, how these global assemblages are renegotiating local power relations and enhancing gender imbalance and health disparities for women in these villages.

Keywords:

• Mobile health
• mHealth
• mobile phone
• maternal care
• mobile technologies
• ICT
• developing countries
• gender

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Marine Al Dahdah

Marine Al Dahdah holds a PhD in Sociology from Paris Descartes University. She is a IFRIS postdoctoral research fellow in CERMES3 (Centre for Research in Medicine, Science, Health, Mental Health and Society). During her PhD, she has worked on the use of mobile phones to improve maternal health in South Asia and Sub-Saharan Africa. She is the author of several articles dedicated to mobile health and digital health in the Global South. In her present research, she examines digital technologies used to improve health coverage in the Global South. This research calls on an analysis of digital politics, that is the means of government but also the political and socio-economical implications and consequences of digital technologies deployed in the developing world. Based on case studies in South Asia and Sub-Saharan Africa, this research tries to unpack the major alterations to welfare states, health services and patients that occur throughout this process of digitalisation.