Financial Data Mapping In East Africa

James Goulding from the University of Nottingham in the United Kingdom will address the knowledge gap in developing countries that is hampering development particularly of financial services by accessing real-time mobile phone call records and mobile financial transactions and using them to locate and model financial behavior across Tanzania. This approach could be faster, lower cost and more reliable than existing approaches that use small sample sizes or are based on crowd-sourcing. They will mathematically process call records to extract location, and produce nation-wide informational maps supplemented by data from unmanned aerial vehicles and local residents for regions lacking detailed maps. These data will then be used to generate predictive models of financial flows, mobility and communications across the country for informing financial service providers and commercial enterprises. Their approach will be evaluated by comparison with existing models.