Mobile Phone Data for Children on the Move: Challenges and Opportunities

Today, 95% of the global population has 2G mobile phone coverage (GSMA 2017) and the number of individuals who own a mobile phone is at an all time high. Mobile phones generate rich data on billions of people across different societal contexts and have in the last decade helped redefine how we do research and build tools to understand society. As such, mobile phone data have the potential to revolutionize how we tackle humanitarian problems, such as many suffered by refugees all over the world (United Nations Secretary-General’s Independent Expert Advisory Group on a Data Revolution for Sustainable Development. A world that counts: Mobilising the data revolution for sustainable development, 2014 [64]). While promising, mobile phone data and the new computational approaches bring both opportunities and challenges (Blumenstock in Estimating economic characteristics with phone data, pp. 72–76, 2018 [9]). Mobile phone traces contain detailed information regarding people’s whereabouts, social life, and even financial standing. Therefore, developing and adopting strategies that open data up to the wider humanitarian and international development community for analysis and research while simultaneously protecting the privacy of individuals are of paramount importance (UNDG 2018). Here we outline the challenging situation of children on the move and actions UNICEF is pushing in helping displaced children and youth globally, and discuss opportunities where mobile phone data can be used. We identify three key challenges: data access, data and algorithmic bias, and operationalization of research, which need to be addressed if mobile phone data are to be successfully applied in humanitarian contexts.

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