CAISS were privileged to have Assistant Professor Xiao Hui Tao from the University of California Davies deliver our December talk.
Xiao Hui talked to us about how mobile phone data is used to monitor internal displacement within a country, in this case Afghanistan. This is especially relevant at present due to current world events. The forced displacement of people is a key cost of violence and Internal Displaced Persons (IDP) are hard to keep track off. This matters in terms of targeting aid more effectively and understanding likely locations of future instability in order to allocate forces or target specific programmes.
The “vast untapped resource” of mobile phone data was utilised to estimate violence induced placement in a granular manner. This was both methodological and substantive i.e. what was the overall effect of violence on displacement in Afghanistan, what factors affected the choice of destination and could the team confirm and test hypotheses from qualitative work gathered from surveys? A large amount of mobile phone data was used: 20 billion transactions, from the anonymised records of 10 million subscribers from Afghanistan’s largest mobile phone operator from April 2013 to March 2017. 398 districts were identified and 5,984 violent events, 13,000 cell towers grouped by proximity into 1,439 tower groups. The results showed that for those in district on a violent day, there was an immediate and statistically significant increase in likelihood of leaving the district. Results also showed that when looking at Islamic State violence versus Taliban violence, there was a larger impact for IS related violence than for the Taliban, this could be credited to the fact that IS have been known to target civilians when for example executions were filmed. There was also a larger impact with recently experienced violence and a smaller impact in provincial capitals.
When being displaced people were not just seeking economic opportunity. Half of those moving from a capital moved to other capitals or major cities. For those moving from non- capitals, more than half went to capitals or major cities with 30% moving to a provincial capital in the same province. The main driver was seeking safety rather than economic opportunities and this is consistent with the narrative. In non-capitals, violence resulted in people seeking safety close to home.
Xiao Hui talked specifically about some of the limitations and mitigating biases:
- There could be bias in the data sources
- Check and check again if the results contain bias
- People could be sharing mobile phones
- Are phones only being used by the wealthy
- Are women using phones in a patriarchal society?
- Is the displacement intra district rather than inter district?
- Are cell phone towers being destroyed resulting in data of false displacement?
The analysis of this data provided insight into the nature of violence-induced displacement in Afghanistan and helped to quantify some of the human costs of violence that would be difficult to measure using traditional methods such as surveys. While there are definite limitations to what can be observed through mobile phone data, conflict-prone regions are often also the places where traditional survey-based data are the least reliable and most difficult to obtain. This approach could complement traditional perspectives on displacement and eventually contribute to the design of effective policies for prevention and mitigation.
