Capacity building in Mongolia

Albert Ali Salah and Bilgecag Aydogdu from the Social and Affective Computing Group at the Dept. of Information and Computing Sciences are providing capacity building workshops to the National Statistics Office of Mongolia.
 
Researchers of Utrecht University have teamed up with Oxford Centre for Technology and Development Ltd. and IOM Mongolia to provide a series of capacity building workshops at the National Statistics Office of Mongolia, with the aim of discussing the use of mobile phone data for addressing data gaps in internal mobility. Mongolia is a large country with nomadic population movements, which are costly and difficult to keep track of. Data collaboratives between the government and mobile telecommunications companies can provide new ways of estimation for population dynamics, and address some shortcomings of census-bases data collection. Most importantly, the processing of mobile phone data (i.e. the so-called call detail records, which is a form of meta-information) can lead to much quicker insights about what is happening in the country.
 
Currently, UU leads the mobile phone analysis work package in the Hummingbird EU Horizon project, where telecommunications data are being analyzed from Turkey to derive migration indicators, as well as to develop approaches to perform such analysis in a GDPR-compliant, privacy-aware, and ethically sound manner. The project in Mongolia further illustrates the potential of such data sources.