International Meeting on Measuring Human Mobility
Hosted by the National Statistics Office of Georgia (GeoStat)
- Tbilisi, Georgia
- 27 – 29 March 2019
Overview
The international community agreed to 17 Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) with 169 targets to be achieved by 2030 - a universal call to action to end poverty, protect the planet and ensure that all people enjoy peace and prosperity. To monitor progress, a global set of SDG indicators has been developed which all countries are required to regularly report on. For example, SDG indicators should help to monitor progress on target 8.9 (to promote sustainable tourism which creates jobs, promotes local culture and products) or target 10.7 (to facilitate orderly, safe, and responsible migration and mobility of people). Traditional data collection methods, such as surveys, may not be sufficient to address the increased demand in timely, frequent and granular data.
For this reason, the UN Statistical Commission created a UN Global Working Group (GWG) on Big Data for official statistics to develop and test the use of new data sources and new technologies. The aim of the GWG is to lower the barriers of entry, particularly for developing countries, in the use of big data. A range of task teams were established under the GWG to explore the use satellite data, mobile phone data, scanner data, and social media data.
Mobile phone data could help determine where tourists and migrants come from, how long they stay and where they go. The granularity of information which potentially can be obtained through the use of mobile phone data is much higher than what can be obtained through traditional surveys. The time lag from data collection to analysis could also be significantly reduced. The project on measuring human mobility (as part of the deliverables of the GWG task team on mobile phone data) aims to estimate population mobility patterns broken down by migrants, seasonal workers and tourists.
The international meeting is built on three parts, namely (1) measuring human mobility using mobile phone data, (2) compiling migration and tourism statistics using traditional data sources, and (3) project implementation using the UN Global Planform.
UNSD, ITU, national statistical offices, other national agencies and other international institutes will work together to develop and test methods to estimate migration and tourism statistics in Georgia with use of mobile phone data from Georgian mobile phone operators. Thereafter, other countries will test these new methods, such as Indonesia, Malaysia, Oman, Italy, the Netherlands, Columbia and Egypt.
Format:
- Interactive segments
- Each segment prepared by small team
- Background documentation
- Brief introduction – few slides
- White Board and Flip Chart sessions
Wednesday, 27 March 2019
09:00 - 09:30
Welcome
Mr. Gogita Todradze, Executive Director, National Statistics Office of Georgia
09:30 - 12:30
Overview of the project of measuring human mobility
Ronald Jansen, Paata Shavishvili, and Haoyi Chen
- Overview
- Identifying use cases
- Definition of objectives
- Available data sources
- Execution of the project
- Setting the Stage: Measuring Human Mobility using new and traditional data sources - UNSD (Ronald Jansen)
- Improving statistics on international migration – capacity building activities - UNSD (Haoyi Chen)
- Cooperation with UNSD in the field of migration statistics - GeoStat (Paata Shavishvili)
- The Use of Mobile Positioning Data for Official Statistics: Indonesia's experience - Statistics Indonesia (Titi Kanti)
14:00 - 17:00
Session 1: Use of Mobile Phone data
Ronald Jansen, Ketevan Rekhviashvili, Siim Esko, and Fabio Ricciato
- Commercial use of mobile phone data
- Additional uses of mobile phone data
- Possibilities of cooperation between MNO and NSO
- What is mobile phone data? Overview of data generated by mobile communication technologies - Positium (Siim Esko)
- ITU Pilot project - Big Data for Measuring the Information Society - ITU/BDT (Esperanza Magpantay)
- Overview of current activities in MNO data at EUROSTAT - EUROSTAT (Fabio Ricciato)
- Big Data - GNCC (Ketevan Rekhviashvili)
Thursday, 28 March 2019
09:00 - 12:30
Session 2: Migration Data – case of Georgia
Haoyi Chen, Michele Vespe, Ingmar Weber, and Paata Shavishvili
- Migration statistics and seasonal workers
- Institutional arrangements and available data sources
- Use of additional data sources – mobile phone and social media
- Overview of Migration Statistics in Georgia - GeoStat (Shorena Tsiklauri)
- The European Commission's science and knowledge service - Joint Research Centre (Michele Vespe)
- Using Social Media Advertising Data to Monitor Global Migration - QCRI (Ingmar Weber)
- UNECE Guidance on data integration for measuring migration - UNECE (Paolo Valente)
- Migration Data in Georgia - SCM (Nino Ghvinadze)
14:00 - 17:00
Session 3: Other Human Mobility statistics
Ronald Jansen, Karoly Kovacs, Peter Laimer, Titi Lestari, and Siim Esko
- Tourism and event statistics
- Commuter statistics and population density
- Use of traditional and new data sources
- Measuring tourism flows with mobile data in Austria - an ongoing project - Statistics Austria (Peter Laimer, Johanna Ostertag-Sydler)
- Tourism and event statistics - Eurostat (Christophe Demunter)
- Coverage challenges to overcome with MPD - Positium (Siim Esko)
- Georgia Tourism in Figures - Georgia NTA (Giorgi Bregadze)
- Combining Big Data with Small Data for the best results of Official Statistics - BPS Indonesia (Titi Kanti Lestari)
Friday, 29 March 2019
09:00 - 12:30
Session 4: UN Global Platform – implementation of project details
Ronald Jansen, Fabio Ricciato, Siim Esko, Katy Rekhviashvili, and Michele Vespe
- Definition of project spaces
- Access to data sources
- Development of methods and algorithms
- Execution of the project (project management, timeline)
14:00 - 16:00
Conclusions and way forward
Ronald Jansen, Paata Shavishvili, and Haoyi Chen
- Confirmation of objectives
- Confirmation of available data sources
- Execution of the project
