Health-in-all, Data Harmonisation, and Cross-sectoral Collaboration in Ghana’s Health Sector

This chapter explores Ghanaian institutions’ collaboration in holistic health decisions in the interest of the global movement towards “Health in all Policies.” Specifically, it answers the question of which data practices emerge to span persisting inter-agency interstices in these collaborative engagements. In so doing, the chapter sheds light on the bottom-up data practices that often invisibly (and in a taken-for-granted-way) contribute to digital quantification. The chapter proceeds by narrowing in on the now well-established digital health information system DHIS2, and its role in the 2020 National Health Policy’s goal of integrating determinants and institutions for holistic health outcomes. In a first step, the chapter provides an overview of the current health policies shaping health data collection and analysis. The evolution of digital health records in Ghana is retraced. The chapter then presents ethnographic observations of the de/mobilising vectors, and de/synchronising effects of digitalisation, problematising its central promise of acceleration and interoperability.