Africa’s recent communications ‘revolution’ has generated optimism that using mobile phones for health (mhealth) can help bridge healthcare gaps, particularly for rural, hard-to-reach populations. However, while scale-up of mhealth pilots remains limited, health-workers across the continent possess mobile phones. This article draws on interviews from Ghana and Malawi to ask whether/how health-workers are using their phones informally and with what consequences. Health-workers were found to use personal mobile phones for a wide range of purposes: obtaining help in emergencies; communicating with patients/colleagues; facilitating community-based care, patient monitoring and medication adherence; obtaining clinical advice/information and managing logistics. However, the costs were being borne by the health-workers themselves, particularly by those at the lower echelons, in rural communities, often on minimal stipends/salaries, who are required to ‘care’ even at substantial personal cost. Although there is significant potential for ‘informal mhealth’ to improve (rural) healthcare, there is a risk that the associated moral and political economies of care will reinforce existing socioeconomic and geographic inequalities.

The African communications 'revolution' has generated optimism that mobile phones might help overcome infrastructural barriers to healthcare provision in resource-poor contexts. However, while formal m-health programmes remain limited in coverage and scope, young people are using mobile phones creatively and strategically in an attempt to secure effective healthcare. Drawing on qualitative and quantitative data collected in 2012-2014 from over 4500 young people (aged 8-25 y) in Ghana, Malawi and South Africa, this paper documents these practices and the new therapeutic opportunities they create, alongside the constraints, contingencies and risks. We argue that young people are endeavouring to lay claim to a digitally-mediated form of therapeutic citizenship, but that a lack of appropriate resources, social networks and skills ('digital capital'), combined with ongoing shortcomings in healthcare delivery, can compromise their ability to do this effectively. The paper concludes by offering tentative suggestions for remedying this situation.

Young people's use of mobile phones is expanding exponentially across Africa. Its transformative potential is exciting, but findings presented in this paper indicate how the downside of mobile phone use in African schools is becoming increasingly apparent. Drawing on mixed-methods field research in 24 sites across Ghana, Malawi and South Africa and associated discussions with educational institutions, public policy makers and network providers, we examine the current state of play and offer suggestions towards a more satisfactory alignment of practice and policy which promotes the more positive aspects of phone use in educational contexts and militates against more damaging ones.

(2012) 'Youth, mobility and mobile phones in Africa : ndings from a three-country study.', Information technology for development., 18 (2). pp. 145-162. Further information on publisher's website: Additional information:Use policyThe full-text may be used and/or reproduced, and given to third parties in any format or medium, without prior permission or charge, for personal research or study, educational, or not-for-prot purposes provided that:• a full bibliographic reference is made to the original source • a link is made to the metadata record in DRO • the full-text is not changed in any way The full-text must not be sold in any format or medium without the formal permission of the copyright holders.Please consult the full DRO policy for further details.

This is the author's version of a work that was accepted for publication in Geoforum. Changes resulting from the publishing process, such as peer review, editing, corrections, structural formatting, and other quality control mechanisms may not be reected in this document. Changes may have been made to this work since it was submitted for publication. A denitive version was subsequently published in Porter, G., Hampshire, K., Abane, A., Robson, E., Munthali, A., Mashiri, M. and Tanle, A. (2010) 'Moving young lives : mobility, immobility and inter-generational tensions in urban Africa.', Geoforum., 41 (5). pp. 796-804, doi: 10.1016/j.geoforum.2010.05.001 Additional information: Use policyThe full-text may be used and/or reproduced, and given to third parties in any format or medium, without prior permission or charge, for personal research or study, educational, or not-for-prot purposes provided that:• a full bibliographic reference is made to the original source • a link is made to the metadata record in DRO • the full-text is not changed in any way The full-text must not be sold in any format or medium without the formal permission of the copyright holders.Please consult the full DRO policy for further details. In the story we present in this paper, mobility -as experience, opportunity, challenge, temptation and performance -plays a key role.Mobility and immobility, we argue, are key factors shaping young people's urban experience and their future life chances across sub-Saharan Africa. For young people, mobility achieved may, on the one hand, be a source of excitement, temptation, thrills, inclusion, opportunity and perceived success; on the other, a cause of exhaustion, danger and fear. Mobility frustrated, by contrast, is most often seen purely in negative terms: a source of anger, despair, exclusion and perceived failure. In this paper we focus on mobilities in the everyday -daily journeys to school, work, church, the market and video house, to meet friends, relations, lovers, teachers, business operators. The more extensive mobilities of migration from the distant village or another country are largely outside our 2 frame. Our principal aim is to chart young people's mobility experiences -how they use and experience the city -developing a comparative perspective across the three urban study sites that links young people's mobility with the power relations which operate to shape their movements in individual locations. In particular, we consider how positive and negative images of young people's mobility play out in terms of the intergenerational frictions and negotiations generated by their mobility performances within local cultural settings. We also reflect on the developmental consequences of mobility achieved and mobility frustrated, in terms of young people's access to services and income and their participation in the social networks and peer culture which may shape their life trajectories. This requires us to consider how factors such as gender and age intersect with specific local conditions (ec...