Measuring Migration with Digital Data

Project description

Understanding the causes and effects of internal migration is critical to the effective design and implementation of policies that promote human development. However, a major impediment to deepening this understanding is the lack of reliable data on the movement of individuals within a country. Government censuses and household surveys, from which most migration statistics are derived, are difﬁcult to coordinate and costly to implement, and typically do not capture the patterns of temporary and circular migration that are prevalent in developing economies.

In a series of related projects, we show how new information and communications technologies (ICTs), and mobile phones in particular, can provide a new source of data on internal migration. As these technologies quickly proliferate throughout the developing world, billions of individuals are now carrying devices from which it is possible to reconstruct detailed trajectories through time and space.