Dynamic Census Project for Malaria Elimination in Mozambique

Ayumi Arai of the University of Tokyo in Japan will use anonymized mobile phone data to produce a dynamic census that reveals the movements of all individuals in a population over time broken down into age and gender to help reduce regional malaria transmission. Human mobility and distribution play key roles in malaria transmission but it is difficult to monitor the movements of everybody in a population. They will gather call detail records and use them to develop an algorithm that considers non-phone users such as children and the elderly, and can predict gender and age group, which are linked to malaria vulnerability. To generate the dynamic census they will build a system incorporating application programming interfaces to support different input and output data formats to promote use by third parties and in other countries. They will apply the system to create a dynamic census of Mozambique, and validate it using data from transport networks and small-scale surveys.