This ethnographic project involves a comprehensive one-year-long fieldwork initiative conducted in both urban and peri-urban areas of Zambia to investigate the integration of digital technology in maternal care, with a particular focus on Dawa Mom, a mobile clinic and telemedicine service addressing obstetric challenges faced by expectant mothers in Sub-Saharan Africa. The fieldsite comprises real and virtual engagement: understanding the coding of the Dawa Mom app in its backend, its translation onto the user interface and how the adoption of this software intertwines with maternal life situated across various inequalities.

Several insights address the question of how care ethics are informed by emerging technologies in Zambia, which include how digital technologies contribute to existing medical pluralisms; the parallels drawn between institutionalised archives on hospitals and curated patient datasets for machine learning; the users’ experience when using a mobile healthcare app to supplement their care and how a digital object is integrated into the materiality of human life. From this, we discern the restructuring of the hospital within a region where the course of life is influenced by evolving modernity.

This project is a component of the Future Hospitals: 4IR and Ethics of Care in Africa project at the Institute for Humanities in Africa, University of Cape Town. Funded by the Carnegie Corporation of New York