Putting Mobile Phone Big Data to work for Policy and Official Statistics
Blog by Craig Hammer, Senior Program Manager, Global Data Facility, World Bank Development Data Group; Esperanza Magpantay, Senior Statistician, ITU; Trevor Monroe, Program Manager, World Bank Development Data Group; and Sveta Milusheva, Senior Economist, World Bank.
11 April 2023.
As COVID-19 restrictions started to take hold in many countries at the onset of the pandemic, several policymakers turned to an innovative resource to track population movement patterns: Mobile Phone Big Data (MPD).
In this blog submitted for the World Data Forum 2023, the authors look at the use of MPD data in several contexts and use cases, before and during the COVID-19 pandemic, and look into the emergence of practical resources (ethics principles, maturity frameworks, statistical methods, tools, and good practices) to mainstream the global use of MPD for official statistics within this decade.
In this blog, you will also read the perspective of Dr Linus Bengtsson, Executive Director and Co-founder of Flowminder, on how such datasets could or should be institutionalised in the long run.