Related papers: Virtual Networks and Poverty Analysis in Senegal
Cell phone coverage and high-speed service gaps persist in rural areas in sub-Saharan Africa, impacting public access to mobile-based financial, educational, and humanitarian services. Improving maps of telecommunications infrastructure can…
The mapping of populations socio-economic well-being is highly constrained by the logistics of censuses and surveys. Consequently, spatially detailed changes across scales of days, weeks, or months, or even year to year, are difficult to…
Mapping the spatial distribution of poverty in developing countries remains an important and costly challenge. These "poverty maps" are key inputs for poverty targeting, public goods provision, political accountability, and impact…
The rapid spread of mobile phones means that the number of mobile users may already exceed the number of banked people in many low income countries. Mobile phones can also offer a communications channel for initiating and executing on-line…
Approximately half of the global population does not have access to the internet, even though digital connectivity can reduce poverty by revolutionizing economic development opportunities. Due to a lack of data, Mobile Network Operators and…
We create a network model to study the spread of an epidemic through physically proximate and accidental daily human contacts in a city, and simulate outcomes for two kinds of agents - poor and non-poor. Under non-intervention, peak…
Governments spend billions of dollars subsidizing the adoption of different goods. However, it is difficult to gauge whether those goods are resold, or are valued by their ultimate recipients. This project studies a program to subsidize the…
Ending poverty in all its forms everywhere is the number one Sustainable Development Goal of the UN 2030 Agenda. To monitor the progress towards such an ambitious target, reliable, up-to-date and fine-grained measurements of socioeconomic…
The D4D-Senegal challenge is an open innovation data challenge on anonymous call patterns of Orange's mobile phone users in Senegal. The goal of the challenge is to help address society development questions in novel ways by contributing to…
Internet penetration rates in Africa are rising steadily, and mobile Internet is getting an even bigger boost with the availability of smartphones. Young people are increasingly using the Internet, especially social networks, and Senegal is…
With the rapid expansion of mobile phone networks in developing countries, large-scale graph machine learning has gained sudden relevance in the study of global poverty. Recent applications range from humanitarian response and poverty…
The Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) aim to resolve societal challenges, such as eradicating poverty and improving the lives of vulnerable populations in impoverished areas. Those areas rely on road infrastructure construction to…
Improving global school connectivity is critical for ensuring inclusive and equitable quality education. To reliably estimate the cost of connecting schools, governments and connectivity providers require complete and accurate school…
Poverty is a multifaceted phenomenon linked to the lack of capabilities of households to earn a sustainable livelihood, increasingly being assessed using multidimensional indicators. Its spatial pattern depends on social, economic,…
In this work, we explore the relationship between monetary poverty and production combining relatedness theory, graph theory, and regression analysis. We develop two measures at product level that capture short-run and long-run patterns of…
Accurate local-level poverty measurement is an essential task for governments and humanitarian organizations to track the progress towards improving livelihoods and distribute scarce resources. Recent computer vision advances in using…
Access to motorable roads is a critical dimension of urban infrastructure, particularly in rapidly urbanizing regions such as Sub-Saharan Africa. Yet, many urban communities, especially those in informal settlements, remain disconnected…
Recent studies have shown the value of mobile phone data to tackle problems related to economic development and humanitarian action. In this research, we assess the suitability of indicators derived from mobile phone data as a proxy for…
This study leverages mobile phone data to analyze human mobility patterns in developing countries, especially in comparison to more industrialized countries. Developing regions, such as the Ivory Coast, are marked by a number of factors…
We describe a method to identify poor households in data-scarce countries by leveraging information contained in nationally representative household surveys. It employs standard statistical learning techniques---cross-validation and…