Exploited Gendered Labour of Kenya’s Digital Health Age

In “Exploited Gendered Labour of Kenya’s Digital Health Age,” Wangui Kimari chronicles the mostly unpaid labour that Kenya’s Community Health Volunteers (CHV’s) perform. Kimari interrogates the connections between the exploitation of CHV’s, the extraction of bio-medical data, narratives around the “inevitably of technological progress,” and ways in which care work is racialized and gendered.

This paper is part of Nawi Collective’s “Care under Social Reproduction” series. Nawi Collective is a Care Economies in Context project partner.

Citation

Kimari, W. (2025). Exploited Gendered Labour of Kenya’s Digital Health Age. https://drive.google.com/file/d/1xDRagv0QcIArq-wP2Odl3mAneBygQL9x/view

Abstract

In this paper, I make two movements: first, I chronicle the role that community health workers play in contributing to a digital and data age that exploits their dedication to their communities and transforms both their workloads and the nature of their voluntary work. In doing so, I endeavour to contribute to a scholarship that asks, in the words of Ruha Benjamin (2016, 145): “Who and what are fixed in place—classified, corralled, and/or coerced—to enable technoscientific development?” Correspondingly, the second argument put forward is that as Kenya pursues technological developments in the health sector, it is community health volunteers, primarily poor urban and rural women, who are “fixed in place” to allow for advancements in the provision of state-delivered medical attention. Here, in these processes, the benefits of digitized data accrue elsewhere and are not distributed to them either financially or through the availability of transformed quality healthcare provision for them and their communities.