Leveraging Mobility Data in Global Development

[g4brielvs]

With the popularization of smartphone usage and connectivity across the world, the last decade has witnessed the emergence of massive mobility datasets, such call detail records, geo-tagged posts from social media platforms and generated from GPS devices. These datasets have propelled rich scientific production on various applications of mobility analysis, ranging from epidemiology to disaster resilience, urban planning and transportation engineering.

Through the Development Data Partnership, Development Partners have access to high-frequency location-based mobility data, constituted of high temporal and spatial resolution timestamped geographical points generated by GPS-enabled devices.

Examples

• Development Data Partnership's Geolocation Data Collection

Ideas

To better support Development Partners, the Development Data Partnership will devise and maintain the methodologies/data products to facilitate the use of geolocation by project teams in global development.

Activity

Similarly to COVID-19 Community Mobility Reports, Facebook Population During Crisis and Mapbox Movement Data, we generate a series of crisis-relevant metrics, including the baseline device count (sampled population), percent change and z-score. The metrics are calculated by counting devices drawn out from a mobility data panel in each tile and at each time period and comparing to a baseline period.

• Türkiye Earthquake Impact.

Corridors

Points-of-Interest Visits

[g4brielvs]

For Activity, the WB Data Lab introduced an exploratory analysis in the Türkiye Earthquake Impact.

[g4brielvs]

For the Lebanon Economic Monitor, the WB Data Lab is carrying out an exploratory analysis in leveraging mobility data to estimate population-related metrics. See also: datapartnership/lebanon-economic-monitor#2.

[andre-martini]

Hello @g4brielvs. Just joined the Development Data Partnership and very excited to get started!

Thank you for setting up this conversation!

I guess the resource you are pointing to (https://docs.datapartnership.org/collections/mobility/README.html) is only available after login with SSO on the portal and not here on Github, right?
Also partially overlapping with the link (https://docs.datapartnership.org/collections/mobility/docs/geolocation-data/README.html#availability) provided in this discussion.

A side node: looks useful to have this forum, I like the idea!

Thank you in advance for your reply!

Best regards,
Andrea

[g4brielvs]

@andre-martini Welcome, welcome! And thank you for your question. The resources can be found at mobility and geolocation data availability. While our IT teams are working on SSO - which will grant access to the Documentation - you can navigate through the source on GitHub. Please let me know if you have any questions, comments and suggestions or if you can't find what you're looking for. I hope we can turn this forum into a valuable resource for our community.

[andre-martini]

Hi @g4brielvs, thank you for the warm welcome and your reply!
I tested to run geolocation data but got a PermissionError: Forbidden error. I guess because I don't have a token or key to access any resource, right?
Indeed what I was looking for was the 'Activity' metrics as described in the first post, i.e.:

[...] a series of crisis-relevant metrics, including the baseline device count (sampled population), percent change and z-score. The metrics are calculated by counting devices drawn out from a mobility data panel in each tile and at each time period and comparing to a baseline period [...]
Thank you in advance for your help.

[g4brielvs]

@andre-martini That's correct. The Partnership facilitates the sharing of non-public data through a common legal framework, which UNICEF is now a Development Partner of. As staff, you will be able to submit a proposal on the Portal to request data opportunities offered by Data Partners. Upon approval, a Data Sharing Plan containing instructions (and keys) to access the data would be sent to the project team.

You may learn more at https://datapartnership.org/about.

[g4brielvs]

@andre-martini As for "Activity", you may see Türkiye Earthquake Impact for an example. This is a Partnership-supported exploratory analysis.

[andre-martini]

Thank you @g4brielvs that's very helpful. As we are internally prioritizing some key Data Partners we would like to set up an agreement with, could we base our review using data availability displayed in the maps of geolocation data? I am asking to know if that info is up-to-date and represent the current data availability from those Data Partners. Indeed, e.g. if a partner only provides data for US, we could clearly delete it from our wishlist as UNICEF is not operating in that country.
Thank you for any feedback and your support.