But last week, I took part in a seminar organised by America’s Brookings Institution and Blum Center to discuss development and global economics. And now I am looking at that mobile phone with fresh eyes. For what became clear in discussions with aid workers, healthcare officials and US diplomats is that those oft-ignored mobile devices are not just changing the way the western world lives – but changing the lives of poor societies, too. This, in turn, has some intriguing potential to reshape parts of how the global development business is done.
These days, there are about 2.5 billion people in emerging markets countries who own a mobile phone. In places such as the Philippines, Mexico and South Africa, mobile phone coverage is nearly 100 per cent of the population, while in Uganda it is 85 per cent. That has not only left people better connected than before – which has big political and commercial implications – it has also made their movements, habits and ideas far more transparent. And that is significant, given that it has often been extremely hard to monitor poor societies in the past, particularly when they are scattered over large regions.
Consider what happened two-and-a-half years ago when the Haitian earthquake struck. The population scattered when the tremors hit, leaving aid agencies scrambling to work out where to send help. Traditionally, they could only have done this by flying over the affected areas, or travelling on the ground. But some researchers at Columbia University and the Karolinska Institute took a different tack: they started tracking the Sim cards inside mobile phones owned by Haitians, to work out where their owners were located or moving. That helped them to “accurately analyse the destination of more than 600,000 people who were displaced from Port au Prince”, as a UN report says. Then, when a cholera epidemic hit Haiti later, the same researchers tracked the Sim cards again, to put medicine in the correct locations – and prevent the disease from spreading.
Aid groups are not just tracking those physical phones; they are also starting to watch levels of mobile phone usage and patterns of bill payment, too. If this suddenly changes, it can indicate rising levels of economic distress, far more accurately than, say, GDP data. Inside the UN, the secretary general is now launching a project called Global Pulse to screen some of the 2.5 quintillion bytes of so-called “big data” being generated each day around the world, including on social media sites such as Twitter and Facebook. These sites are strikingly popular in parts of the emerging markets world; Indonesia, for example, has one of the most Twitter-addicted populations on the planet. Thus if the UN (or anyone else) spots a sudden increase in certain keywords, this can also provide an early warning of distress. References to food or ethnic strife, for example, may indicate the onset of famine or civil unrest. Similarly, medical researchers have learnt in the past couple of years that social media references to infection area are powerful early warning signal of epidemics – and more timely than official alerts from government doctors.
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