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Generalising Poverty Mapping from Mobile Phones in Low-Income Countries

3 May 2017

Location:

Building 44, Room 1087, Highfield, University of Southampton

Times:

12.00 - 13.00

Summary:

A lunchtime presentation to show how the use of aggregated mobile phone data can identify areas of poverty and facilitate the targeting of services.

Full Details:


Generalising Poverty Mapping from Mobile Phones in Low-Income Countries


When  : 3rd May,  2017 : 12.00 - 13.00
Where : Building 44, Room 1087, Highfield, University of Southampton, 

What   : Organised by the Applied Spacial Modelling Group, University of Southampton, this talk will be given by Dr Jessica Steele. 

Poverty is one of the most important determinants of adverse health outcomes globally, a major cause of societal instability, and one of the largest causes of lost human potential. Traditional approaches to measuring and targeting poverty rely heavily on census data, which in most low- and middle-income countries (LMICs) are unavailable or out-of-date.

This study demonstrates how aggregated and anonymised call detail records (CDRs) from telecom companies in LMICs can be used to provide novel insight into the spatial distribution of poverty. 

Following the work of Steele et al. 2017 "Mapping poverty using mobile phone and satellite data" a subset CDR package of mobile data common to three LMICs was utilised to generalise poverty mapping across continents and cultures. This work evaluates the ability of a few easily replicable, nationally representative indicators calculated from users' mobile phone activity and behaviour to accurately predict poverty.

This talk will present results from this work, highlighting similarities and differences across countries for national-level poverty mapping using mobile phone data.

For more information about the event, contact Dr Jessica Steele

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