Dr Azza Mustafa Babikir Ahmed
Postdoctoral Research Fellow
Azza Ahmed completed a doctoral degree in Anthropology from the Bayreuth International Graduate School for African Studies (BIGSAS), Germany. She holds a master’s and bachelor’s degree in Social Anthropology and Sociology, both from the University of Khartoum, Sudan.
Her research interests include digital and urban anthropology, urban planning and infrastructures, mobilities, peace research, and gender and development.
She was a research assistant on numerous projects and a research associate at the Institute of Geography at the University of Bonn, Germany and the Research Group Social Geography at the University of Bayreuth, Germany. She was a lecturer at the University of Gezira, Sudan and a Research and Coordination Assistant at the Gender and Development programme, Development Studies and Research Institute (DSRI) at the University of Khartoum, Sudan.
Azza is a member of the African Good Governance Network (AGGN).
The Digitisation of Healthcare in Africa: The Case of Babyl Rwanda
This presentation will explore Rwanda’s path of healthcare digitisation by following Babyl Rwanda’s trajectories, which is considered Rwanda’s first digital healthcare service (Babyl-Press, 2018).
Babyl is a subsidiary of Babylon Health, a digital healthcare company based in the United Kingdom. Babylon Health provides remote medical consultations with General Practitioners and other healthcare providers by text and video messaging via its digital tools.
This talk will tackle this central question: how is Babyl’s technology situated within the social, economic, and political entanglements towards a future of health digitisation in Rwanda? It also serves as a contribution to the ongoing debate on smart technologies on the continent. While healthcare smart technologies can support people efficiently and affordably in overburdened healthcare systems, opponents have raised concerns about unequal access to these technologies and being overrated (Jack, 2021).
The presentation relies on an extensive literature review on internet sources, journal articles, and books published on the topic. The preliminary findings show that Babyl digital health service is a form of incipient telemedicine services carried out through basic mobile phones that are not necessarily smartphones. The implementation of AI technologies is still in its initial stages, and the implementation of AI medical technology is aimed at attracting funds from local and international donors. I discuss how Babyl opportunity in technology might address Rwanda’s local issues.