Experiencing Femtech On and Offline: What happens when an Egyptian women’s health app brings users together?
October 28, 2026
People
Marisa Breathwaite
ERI/PS2 Public Research Fellow
Marisa Breathwaite is a PhD student in Cultural Anthropology at the CUNY Graduate Center. Her research focuses on the emergence of femtech platforms in Cairo, Egypt and asks how AI-enabled femtech is situated within longer histories of development. Marisa is a 2026 ERI/PS2 Summer Fellow.
Beneath the unforgiving midday sun at an open-air mall in the satellite city of New Cairo, I joined a group of young women who were eagerly awaiting not just the relief of air conditioning, but the opening keynote that would kick off the Daleela Women’s Health Summit 2026: Body Truths– a public event put on by one of Egypt’s first “femtech” startups. Femtech (female technology) refers to consumer-centric digital technologies that primarily address women’s health, and this summer, with the support of the ERI/PS2 Fellowship, I conducted preliminary field research that explores the emergence of the femtech startup in Egypt. My research primarily asks how the discourses and affordances of femtech– like Daleela’s Arabic AI chatbot, period tracker and AI medical consultations– are transforming sexual and reproductive health/care (SRH/C) in Egypt and how these transformations inform individual and institutional relations between founders, funders, users and healthcare providers.
Attending the second edition of the summit allowed me to engage in participant observation to get a sense of the kinds of ideas, technologies and practices that femtech promotes. The audience was greeted by co-founder and CEO, Nour Emam, who has achieved a kind of influencer status as the face of Daleela. After the cheers subsided, Nour detailed what the summit would entail and reflected on Daleela’s growth in the last year, announcing a forthcoming Daleela podcast series. Panel topics included egg freezing, teaching adolescents about their periods, weight management and the role of DNA testing in fertility planning. The summit theme, “Body Truths”, suggests that not only is the body is knowable, but that its “truths” are plural, and throughout the day-long summit, I observed how expert panels, promoted products, even SHR/C trivia and a group meditation exercise, presented the body as a site of knowability and improvement. My preliminary fieldwork raised new questions about women’s SRH/C as a targeted site of improvement and optimization, and through this exploratory encounter, I’ve been able to refine my dissertation proposal, which now aims to contextualize the emergence of femtech within longer histories of women’s social development in Egypt.
Photo by author.
