World Bank Uses Mobile to Gather Poverty Data

The World Bank is using mobile phones to collect up to date information about poverty around the world. In a number of projects in South America and Africa, mobile phones are being used to gather accurate household data about the lives of poor in real time, allowing the Bank to formulate appropriate responses. “High-frequency data is doing to economics what genetics did to medicine,” said Marcelo Guigale, the World Bank’s director of economic policy and policy reduction programs in Africa. “We always had economics before which allowed us to do policy and try to solve people’s problems, but with high-frequency data we’re able to do things we couldn’t do before. “ 

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