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Through seven publications this dissertation shows how anonymized mobile phone data can contribute to the social good and provide insights into human behaviour on a large scale. The size of the datasets analysed ranges from 500 million to…
Cellular networks rely on handovers (HOs) as a fundamental element to enable seamless connectivity for mobile users. A comprehensive analysis of HOs can be achieved through data from Mobile Network Operators (MNOs); however, the vast…
Poverty maps derived from satellite imagery are increasingly used to inform high-stakes policy decisions, such as the allocation of humanitarian aid and the distribution of government resources. Such poverty maps are typically constructed…
Many real-life settings of consumer-choice involve social interactions, causing targeted policies to have spillover-effects. This paper develops novel empirical tools for analyzing demand and welfare-effects of policy-interventions in…
A reliable and affordable access to electricity has become one of the basic needs for humans and is, as such, at the top of the development agenda. It contributes to socio-economic development by transforming the whole spectrum of people's…
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…
The present study provides the first evidence that illiteracy can be reliably predicted from standard mobile phone logs. By deriving a broad set of mobile phone indicators reflecting users financial, social and mobility patterns we show how…
The proliferation of mobile phone usage among learners from diverse socio-economic backgrounds has prompted school authorities to contemplate banning these devices within educational institutions. This research seeks to explore the…
The combination of high-resolution satellite imagery and machine learning have proven useful in many sustainability-related tasks, including poverty prediction, infrastructure measurement, and forest monitoring. However, the accuracy…
Online data sources offer tremendous promise to demography and other social sciences, but researchers worry that the group of people who are represented in online datasets can be different from the general population. We show that by…
In order to induce farmers to adopt a productive new agricultural technology, we apply simple and complex contagion diffusion models on rich social network data from 200 villages in Malawi to identify seed farmers to target and train on the…
Due to the widespread installation of Base Stations, the power consumption of cellular communication is increasing rapidly (BSs). Power consumption rises as traffic does, however, this scenario varies from geolocation to geolocation because…
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…
I establish primitive conditions for unconfoundedness in a coherent model that features heterogeneous treatment effects, spillovers, selection-on-observables, and network formation. I identify average partial effects under minimal…
Can digital payments systems help reduce extreme hunger? Humanitarian needs are at their highest since 1945, aid budgets are falling behind, and hunger is concentrating in fragile states where repression and aid diversion present major…
This article reports from an ongoing 'evaluation for improvement' action research and participatory design project in Rwanda, where the aim is to improve data use practices and the capabilities of the District Health Information Software 2…
Mobile sensing data has become a popular data source for geo-spatial analysis, however, mapping it accurately to other sources of information such as statistical data remains a challenge. Popular mapping approaches such as point allocation…
Despite many decades of research, economically grounded models that analyse energy consumption and energy-efficiency adoption within a unified framework remain underdeveloped. This article addresses this gap by proposing a model of…
In many developing nations, a lack of poverty data prevents critical humanitarian organizations from responding to large-scale crises. Currently, socioeconomic surveys are the only method implemented on a large scale for organizations and…
This paper provides an assessment of experiences and understanding of digital technologies from within an African place. It provides philosophical reflections upon the introduction and existence - appropriation - of digital technologies.…