Advancing Development with Mobile Phone Locational Data : Improving the Effectiveness of Assistance
Mobile phones, and especially smartphones, are opening new ways to assess and improve assistance and the delivery of basic services in the developing world. Each year, developing countries see an annual gain of about 500 million new smartphones, vi...
| Main Authors: | , , , |
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| Format: | Brief |
| Language: | English en_US |
| Published: |
World Bank Group, Washington, DC
2015
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| Subjects: | |
| Online Access: | http://documents.worldbank.org/curated/en/2015/07/24441343/advancing-development-mobile-phone-locational-data-improving-effectiveness-assistance http://hdl.handle.net/10986/22310 |
| Summary: | Mobile phones, and especially
smartphones, are opening new ways to assess and improve
assistance and the delivery of basic services in the
developing world. Each year, developing countries see an
annual gain of about 500 million new smartphones, virtually
all of which generate not only call data records but also,
with their GPS and Wi-Fi capabilities, a rich set of more
precise data on location and movement. The rapid diffusion
of the phones and the locational data they generate are
helping fuel the science of delivery, the evidence-based,
experimental approach to project assessment and improvement.
The technology is finding an expanding variety of uses.
Recent examples involving transport and logistics include:
transit route mapping in Abidjan; supply chain management
for community health workers in Malawi; transport planning
in Cote d’Ivoire; and malaria tracking in Kenya. A notable
and more impromptu use arose after a tsunami hit Japan in
March 2011. Health care authorities used call data records
(CDRs) generated by mobile phones to track the evacuation
from the vicinity of the damaged Fukushima nuclear power
plant. They then meshed the CDRs with health records to
optimize the delivery of needed emergency health treatment. |
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