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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 proliferation of mobile phones has made mobile payments to be widely used in developing economies. However, mobile payment usage in Malawi is low, and there are many limitations to encourage users to continuously use mobile payments.…
Obtaining detailed and reliable data about local economic livelihoods in developing countries is expensive, and data are consequently scarce. Previous work has shown that it is possible to measure local-level economic livelihoods using…
We provide systematic evidence on the potential for estimating household well-being from mobile phone data. Using data from four countries - Afghanistan, Cote d'Ivoire, Malawi, and Togo - we conduct parallel, standardized machine learning…
In low-income settings, the most critical piece of information for electric utilities is the anticipated consumption of a customer. Electricity consumption assessment is difficult to do in settings where a significant fraction of households…
This study provides the first confirmation that individual employment status can be predicted from standard mobile phone network logs externally validated with household survey data. Individual welfare and households vulnerability to shocks…
Globally, two billion people and more than half of the poorest adults do not use formal financial services. Consequently, there is increased emphasis on developing financial technology that can facilitate access to financial products for…
Accurate and comprehensive measurements of a range of sustainable development outcomes are fundamental inputs into both research and policy. We synthesize the growing literature that uses satellite imagery to understand these outcomes, with…
This paper presents a development paradigm for Ethiopia, based on appropriate services and innovative use of mobile communications technologies via applications tailored for sectors like business, finance, healthcare, governance, education…
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…
Mapping deprivation in urban areas is important, for example for identifying areas of greatest need and planning interventions. Traditional ways of obtaining deprivation estimates are based on either census or household survey data, which…
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 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…
Access to accurate, granular, and up-to-date poverty data is essential for humanitarian organizations to identify vulnerable areas for poverty alleviation efforts. Recent works have shown success in combining computer vision and satellite…
Access to financial institutions is difficult in developing economies and especially for the poor. However, the widespread adoption of mobile phones has enabled the development of mobile money systems that deliver financial services through…
Improving access to essential public services like healthcare and education is crucial for human development, particularly in rural Sub-Saharan Africa. However, limited reliable transportation and sparse public facilities present…
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…
Nowadays, the digital divide is one of the major issues facing the global community. Around 3 billion people worldwide are still not-connected or under-connected. In this article, we investigate the use of TV towers with multi user (MU)…
This paper reviews the state of the art in satellite and machine learning based poverty estimates and finds some interesting results. The most important factors correlated to the predictive power of welfare in the reviewed studies are the…
Recently, mobile operators in many developing economies have launched "Mobile Money" platforms that deliver basic financial services over the mobile phone network. While many believe that these services can improve the lives of the poor, a…