Using Mobile Technology to Facilitate the Health Agenda in Nigeria: Issues and Opportunities

In today’s information and technology era, new opportunities abound for the use of information and communication technologies (ICT), particularly in less developed regions, for the purpose of addressing healthcare challenges in the provision of quality care to citizens. A key element is poor dissemination of timely knowledge and information to improve public health and support decision making in order to bring about improvements in all areas of healthcare delivery. This paper describes a study into efforts made in Nigeria to introduce and use mobile phone technology to improve routine maternal health operations and monitor key maternal and child health indicators throughout the country. Actor network theory (ANT) is employed as a rich theoretical lens to aid the analysis of the field data that was collected. The ANT analysis offers in-depth insights into underlying opportunities and issues of the use of this ICT solution. Particularly, it finds that it is important for initiative sponsor(s) to thoughtfully problematise this kind of initiative in order to better align the interests of key actors to the overall goal of the network so that human actors will come to realise their own role within the network by themselves and will not require other actors (such as the project initiator) to compel them to perform certain roles. The paper concludes with implications for future actions towards ensuring that networks such as this achieve stability which will in turn enable it to become durable and established over time.