Project Year
2010
Region(s)
East Africa
Country(ies)
Rwanda
Project Description
This project will use a dataset, a log of all phone calls and transfers made over the Rwandan phone network over the past five years, to better understand how mobile banking is being used, and what the potential impacts on its users will be. By combining this dataset with data from structured phone interviews, the project seeks a deeper understanding of (i) how mobile banking fits into the existing landscape of formal and informal lending, (ii) how existing social networks facilitate the flow of mobile money; and (iii) how different subgroups of the population differentially benefit from access to mobile banking.
Researcher(s)
Joshua Blumenstock
About the Researcher(s)
25 seconds into the video there is an earthquake! The video depicts call traffic in Rwanda on the day of the Lake Kivu earthquake, February 3, 2008. Data obtained from network traffic logs, and is aggregated every minute for every tower. Red (blue) cells correspond to a large (small) number of incoming calls. The earthquake occurs at roughly 09:30, about 25 seconds into the video. Created by Joshua Blumenstock and Yian Shang, at UC Berkeley.