This project was a collaboration between the Global Risk Financing Facility, the Disaster Risk Financing & Insurance Program of the World Bank, the European Space Agency and Data-Pop Alliance. The following publications stem from the collaboration. Crisis Risk Finance Analytics Report The report represents a selection of projects from the Crisis Risk Finance Analytics program (CRFA), as part of the … Read More
Mobile phone data and COVID-19: Missing an opportunity?
This paper describes how mobile phone data can guide government and public health authorities in determining the best course of action to control the COVID-19 pandemic and in assessing the effectiveness of control measures such as physical distancing. It identifies key gaps and reasons why this kind of data is only scarcely used, although their value in similar epidemics has … Read More
Big Data and Development: An Overview
This paper describes the fundamental nature of Big Data as an ecosystem and how it engages with society. Although Big Data has promising applications to real-world problems, it is met with warnings and risks–the most severe being risk to individual privacy, identity and security. In response to these challenges and risks, the paper explores the future of Big Data and … Read More
The Law, Politics and Ethics of Cell Phone Data Analytics
This paper examines Call Detail Records (CDRs) and their expanding role in providing insight into human behavior, movements, and social interactions. As a result of their growing application, certain ethical and legal questions need to be addressed. The paper summarizes current legal frameworks, explores structural socio-political parameters and incentives structuring the sharing of CDRs, proposes guiding ethical principles and discusses … Read More
Quantifying the Data Deluge and the Data Drought
This paper investigates how the world’s Big Data capacity can be understood in terms of the world’s storage capacity and the telecommunication capacity to access this storage (‘the cloud’). This paper follows the methodology of what has become the standard reference in estimating the world’s technological information capacity: Hilbert and López (2011).