To ensure humanitarian and development actors are fully equipped to prepare for and respond to the 2024 hurricane season in Haiti, and better understand general population trends and movements, we are opening up our Haiti Mobility Data Platform.
All existing users, as well as new ones, once approved, are to be upgraded from free to premium access, at no additional charge, providing access to the most up-to-date data on population and mobility across Haiti, to make informed decisions during this critical time.
Why we’re opening up the platform
With the 2024 hurricane season anticipated to be more severe than ever, having access to the latest data is paramount. By opening up the platform, we are providing our users with our most comprehensive, representative and up-to-date estimates of population and mobility across Haiti.
Access to premium data extends the available data from January 2020 through June 2024, far beyond the limited January to June 2020 data available in the free plan version, and will be updated regularly with more recent data. This extensive dataset is crucial for understanding population trends and mobility patterns, which are essential for effective disaster preparedness and response.
Value of population and mobility estimates
This platform provides population and mobility estimates derived from pseudonymised mobile phone usage data (Call Detail Records, CDRs) and weighted via specifically collected survey data. (To understand what CDRs are, how we produce estimates from pseudonymised CDR data, please click here).
The CDR-derived estimates on this platform are invaluable for understanding monthly mobility across Haiti. They are particularly informative for humanitarian need assessments and other disaster preparedness activities. Compared to other existing population and mobility data in Haiti, our estimates consistently quantify monthly changes in the population from 2020. For example, there has been a continuous decrease in the Port-au-Prince metropolitan area population, dipping under 3 million this year, for the first time since 2020, which is notably lower than during the COVID-19 mobility restrictions. In contrast, the population in Les Cayes has been increasing, apart from a few temporary periods such as the 2021 earthquake. Our latest protracted crisis report, where these findings have been taken, and using data from the platform, describes the population changes and mobility over the last four years, providing greater insights on the mobility from the metropolitan area of Port-au-Prince and the impact of the crisis on mobility since 2020.
How to use the platform data
Our platform estimates and metrics monitor the distribution and movements of the Haitian population and their changes over time. With the platform, users can visualise, interact with, and download the indicators, estimates, and metrics for further analysis.
The platform provides four categories of data, updated monthly: residents and relocations (monthly resolution), and presence and movements (daily resolution).
The resident and relocation data are estimates of monthly distribution and population flows across Haiti at communal section level. These data can serve to enhance your ability to prepare for and respond to crises, by quantifying population exposure to hazards per communal section, and informing on trends in population change. Specifically, monthly resident estimates can be used to check whether there has been changes in population due to internal mobility in recent months, such as steady increases or decreases that could make annual population statistics outdated, or unusually large month-to-month fluctuations that would increase confidence intervals on population estimates. This is what we show, using these data, in our preparedness reports, which provide a national and departmental overview of monthly estimated population numbers, trends and largest changes across the country (we will release next week our next preparedness report summarising the situation for the period from July 2023 to June 2024), and the protracted crisis report cited above.
The presence and movements data, which are currently experimental/demo datasets, provide an indication of daily distribution and mobility - which can be useful in case of large and wide scale change in mobility).
Additionally, when a disaster hits, we produce specific statistics and reports estimating disaster-driven displacements from unusual changes in short-term presence and mobility coinciding with the event (our “active crisis” reports). We attempt to provide these short-term event-specific information in a timely manner and make them available via different channels (such as our website and ReliefWeb), and independently from the platform update schedule. If displacements persist over a month, they will affect the monthly resident estimates provided on the platform in the subsequent update(s).
Making the most of the data
We encourage all users to take full advantage of this premium data. If you haven’t registered yet, now is the perfect time to do so. Access to this critical mobility data will greatly benefit those involved in policy-making, humanitarian and development efforts in Haiti, as well as supporting academic research. By leveraging the comprehensive and up-to-date data available on our platform, you can make more informed decisions that can save lives and improve disaster response strategies.
Register now to discover the full potential of the premium account to enhance your preparedness and response efforts in Haiti. Registrations will be reviewed and processed accordingly as quickly as possible.
We will inform users directly when this upgrade might come to an end (towards the end of 2024), and provide details on the next steps for their account.
Contact us
If you have any questions about the data, or would like to discuss more bespoke analytical support, please contact us at haiti.mobility-dashboard@flowminder.org.
For examples of reports and analyses we’ve conducted, in Haiti and elsewhere, please visit our website here.
Special thanks to Digicel Haiti
We would like to take this opportunity to extend our gratitude to Digicel Haiti for their invaluable support in providing us with the pseudonymised data, and for their continuous commitment in supporting development and humanitarian decision-making in Haiti.