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Unlocking Mobile Network Operator Data to Enhance Public Services and Humanitarian Efforts

The paper provides insights to governments, humanitarian organizations and mobile network operators (MNOs) on the shared value proposition of using data for development.

Understanding how best to acquire and integrate new data elements is still a struggle for the development community. The Digital Impact Alliance, in partnership with Delta Partners Group, investigated which data elements (location, user profile, usage and spend) were most useful to each development sector, in comparison to how difficult it was to extract the data.

The team based its analysis on applications in five sectors: economic development, humanitarian assistance, health care, education and agriculture. In order to prioritize the most important insights, the analysis focused on:

  • Viability: The level of risk associated with sharing data
  • Implementability: The ease of data ingestion, transformation, storage, analysis and visualization
  • Replicability: The level of reusability of the same insight across several different development needs and sectors