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Don’t forget people in the use of big data for development

Information from satellites, mobile phones and other sources is not a panacea for international-development problems, warns Joshua Blumenstock.
  1. Joshua Blumenstock

    1. Joshua Blumenstock is director of the Data-Intensive Development Lab and assistant professor at the School of Information, University of California, Berkeley, USA.

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Girls in a Rohingya refugee camp look at a mobile phone

Young Rohingya refugees in Bangladesh in 2018. Credit: Roger Lemoyne/Redux/eyevine

Today, 95% of the global population has mobile-phone coverage, and the number of people who own a phone is rising fast (see ‘Dialling up’)1. Phones generate troves of personal data on billions of people, including those who live on a few dollars a day. So aid organizations, researchers and private companies are looking at ways in which this ‘data revolution’ could transform international development.

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Nature 561, 170-172 (2018)

doi: https://doi.org/10.1038/d41586-018-06215-5

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Competing Interests

J.B. is collaborating on a research project with Branch, a California company that provides micro-loans to people in Africa.

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