Can call detail records provide insights into women's empowerment? A case study from Uganda
Vanya Slavchevska, Marcelo Tyszler, Dharani Dhar Burra, Greg R. Seymour, Sementsov, Denys, Lierde, Astrid van, King, Brian · CGSPace A Repository of Agricultural Research Outputs (Consultative Group for International Agricultural Research) · 2021
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.