Context
Mobile phone data (MPD) is a powerful and timely sources of information available to governments and national statistics offices to understand their populations, particularly in low- and middle-income countries.
When processed responsibly, it can reveal insights on population mobility, distribution and even characteristics, which can enable faster and more evidence-based policy decisions.
Photo credit: Resky Fernanda on Unsplash
Recognising this potential, the World Bank Group’s Global Data Facility (GDF) and the International Telecommunications Union (ITU) launched the Mobile Phone Data (MPD) Programme for Policy.
This initiative is a large coordinated initiative to build government capacity in this domain in low- and middle-income countries, with support from a consortium of expert organisations, including Flowminder.
Yet setting up mobile phone data initiatives (MPD initiatives) is far from straightforward.
Governments face a complex set of interlocking challenges:
- Establishing strategic partnerships with mobile network operators and national statistics offices
- Navigating data governance, privacy requirements, and legal frameworks
- Designing secure data sharing and infrastructure models
- Building the right technical and institutional capacity to process and analyse the data
- Translating outputs into actionable, policy-relevant insights.
The World Bank GDF-ITU's MPD programme was designed to address these challenges systematically, and Flowminder led the training consortium to make this happen.
Our role: We led the design, development, and delivery of the programme’s full training offer, working in close partnership with Positium, Nommon, and the University of Tokyo.
We also provided strategic guidance to the World Bank in shaping the programme’s vision and theory of change.
1. Strategic Advisory
We worked directly with the World Bank GDF team to define a coherent theory of change for the programme, setting out the pathways through which country-level capacity building would translate into improved policy outcomes.
This included identifying the pre-requisites and critical inputs for successful MPD initiatives, and advising on how to structure a programme that could scale across a highly diverse set of country contexts.
2. Training consortium lead
We led the consortium responsible for developing and delivering two complementary foundational training tracks, covering the full data value chain, from set-up to hands-on technical implementation:
- Course 1: Foundations in Mobile Phone Data for Policy: a practical, non-technical introduction for decision-makers and practitioners. Topics include what MPD can and cannot reveal, real-world policy applications, and how to design and implement initiatives responsibly, including data governance and communications considerations.
- Course 2: Technical Foundations in Mobile Phone Data for Policy: a hands-on course for analysts and technical teams, covering data processing pipelines and the production of robust statistical outputs for policy use.
Both courses draw directly on real-world deployments and reflect the collective expertise of the consortium partners.
Impact: The programme has already demonstrated significant reach and influence across its phases of delivery.
Cohort 1 launch and in-Person training (Washington DC, October 2024)
Approximately 100 participants from the 18 countries, took part in the first cohort launch and in-person workshop. Participants included government officials, data analysts, and mobile network operators and regulators representatives. The workshops coincided with Netmob, amplifying exposure and enabling participants to connect with the global MPD research community.
The sessions addressed:
- Pathways to impact: what does it take to move from data access to policy influence?
- Stakeholder mapping and engagement: operators, NSOs, funders, and government ministries
- Win-win partnership models: structuring sustainable data access agreements
- Data characteristics, quality, and privacy-preserving processing approaches
- Infrastructure and data sharing models: from federated access to secure enclaves
- Country maturity assessment: how ready is your country to begin an MPD initiative?
- Applied policy use cases: lessons from existing deployments
Online training expansion (2025)
In 2025, we extended the programme’s reach beyond the original in-person cohort with an online cohort training delivered across 2025.
As a training consortium, we trained this second cohort with new content, accessed via an online learning campus, and weekly live webinars.
Public course launch (Spring 2026)
In Spring 2026, the World Bank moved towards a more public training approach. Hosted on a new platform (xxxx), these foundational training courses have been made available to a wider public.
- Over 700 people signed up for the publicly available courses at launch, highlighting a strong signal of global demand for accessible, high-quality MPD training
- The courses are freely accessible to anyone working at the intersection of data, statistics, and policy.
We want this valuable data source to work for the public good. With these courses, designed to help governments, national statistics offices, and practitioners, we aim to do exactly that: turn mobile network data into timely, responsible, and policy-relevant insights.
— Cathy Riley, Strategic Partnerships Director and Training Consortium Lead, Flowminder
Next steps
The MPD Programme for Policy continues to grow. As additional cohorts are onboarded and the online courses reach new audiences, we remain at the forefront of this work, supporting both the strategic and technical dimensions of capacity building.