Abstract
This thesis is based on an action research project in Tanzania
where I, together with two other researchers have participated
in the deployment of health information system. The project
was initiated in Tanzania on an early stage at Bagamoyo and
now we introduce it to Dar-Es-Salaam. The project group is
part of HISP, an international effort to bring sustainable
health information systems to third world countries. HISP is a
global research and development network focusing on developing
the network and the accompanying software DHIS. HISP/DHIS
started in South Africa and has since been deployed both as a
health sector approach and as software to a number of other
developing countries.
My initial research goal included a participatory approach
based on action-research, interviews and observations to
gather data. The efforts to adapt HISP and DHIS to the
Tanzanian environment have had a lot of different challenges
which is to a large degree different to the ones I would meet
in my known context. The adaptation of the HISP approach to
the Tanzanian health service seemed less a problem than making
people within the Tanzanian HISP network to move in the same
direction.
I argue that information systems in developing countries as
well as western must take into account its social context and
the social implication an IS has on the environment in which
it is present. I also do an attempt to put part of the
empirical data into an actor-network theory story to better
describe the notion of interacting of the actors in the HISP
network in Tanzania.