Abstract

Mobile phone data (MPD) offer significant opportunities to strengthen national statistical systems by providing timely, granular and cost-effective data to complement traditional sources. MPD can support the production of statistics on migration, tourism, population dynamics, disasters, transport and mobility, and the information society. MPD-derived insights can also inform social protection policies, employment planning and the identification of job opportunities.
This presentation highlights international and regional initiatives to operationalize MPD for official statistics. It introduces the United Nations Design and Implementation of Mobile Phone Data Initiatives: A Practical Manual, developed under the UN Committee of Experts on Big Data and Data Science for Official Statistics (UN-CEBD) Task Team on Mobile Phone Data. The Manual provides practical guidance on institutional, legal, technical and operational requirements for establishing sustainable MPD initiatives.
The presentation examines the implementation of the Global Data Facility's Mobile Phone Data Programme (GDF-MPD), jointly led by the International Telecommunication Union (ITU) and the World Bank, with examples focusing on Cohort 2 countries in the Southern African Development Community (SADC). It highlights country-level efforts to strengthen institutional readiness, establish public–private partnerships, build technical capacities and advance priority statistical applications.
A key component is the Mobile Phone Data Governance Framework, which defines institutional functions, responsibilities, decision-making authority and coordination mechanisms among national statistical offices, telecommunications regulators, mobile network operators and other stakeholders.
Finally, the presentation demonstrates how MPD can support monitoring of SDG indicator 17.8.1 on Internet use through the ITU Jupyter Notebook Toolkit, which provides reproducible Python-based workflows for processing mobile network data and generating statistics.
Together, these initiatives illustrate a pathway from methodological guidance and experimentation toward sustainable, nationally owned MPD systems that strengthen official statistics and evidence-based policymaking.