Bodies of Data. Friction and Value at the Reproductive Technology Frontier in Kenya

This dissertation examines the emergence of what I call Kenya’s Data-Driven Reproductive Technology (DRT) Frontier by conceptualising it as a friction-filled terrain shaped by infrastructural fragility, speculative aspiration, and global inequality. It explores how digital infrastructures, global health imaginaries, and reproductive care intersect in uneven and contested
ways. 

Drawing on eight months of multi-sited ethnographic fieldwork across Nairobi’s informal settlements, clinics, and innovation hubs, the thesis traces how excitement around DRTs, and the promise of reproductive data, is produced, circulated, and valued within fragmented infrastructures and speculative futures. 

The analysis shows how pandemic conditions, privatisation, and healthcare digitalisation are reshaping reproductive health delivery in Kenya. By focusing on one non-profit and one for-profit entity, it highlights how digital health platforms, incentive systems, and entrepreneurial interventions reconfigure relations of care and accountability. Ethnographic, friction-filled
encounters around data collection deriving from the registration process, ultrasound consultations, and a reward systems reveal how value, both relational and economic, emerges through two key dimensions: proximity and distance, visibility and opacity.
The dissertation situates Nairobi’s innovation ecosystem within global circuits of investment and speculation, where reproductive data and women’s bodies in informal settlements are rendered as sites of promise and potential.