Can call detail records provide insights into women's empowerment? A case study from Uganda

We use CDRs of mobile phone users in Uganda combined with data from a phone survey to train machine-learning models to predict the sex of the mobile phone user and several indicators of economic empowerment such as ownership of a house and land, occupation, and decision-making over household income....

Descripción completa

Detalles Bibliográficos
Autores principales: Slavchevska, Vanya, Tyszler, Marcelo, Burra, Dharani Dhar, Seymour, Greg, Sementsov, Denys, Lierde, Astrid van, King, Brian
Formato: Informe técnico
Lenguaje:Inglés
Publicado: CGIAR Platform for Big Data in Agriculture 2021
Materias:
Acceso en línea:https://hdl.handle.net/10568/111023
Descripción
Sumario:We use CDRs of mobile phone users in Uganda combined with data from a phone survey to train machine-learning models to predict the sex of the mobile phone user and several indicators of economic empowerment such as ownership of a house and land, occupation, and decision-making over household income. The most accurate of the models predicts the sex of the mobile phone user with 78% accuracy. The different indicators of economic empowerment are predicted with accuracies ranging from 57% to 61%. We also predict users’ sex and economic empowerment jointly. However, when we predict economic empowerment and then the sex of the user, we achieve high accuracy rates ranging from 81% to 87%. Mobile phone usage data hold potential for gender research although they are not without limitations.