The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation (BMGF or the Gates Foundation) is the largest private foundation in the world, founded by Bill and Melinda Gates. It was launched in 2000 and is said to be the largest transparently operated private foundation in the world. The primary aims of the foundation are, globally, to enhance healthcare and reduce extreme poverty, and in America, to expand educational opportunities and access to information technology. The foundation, based in Seattle, Washington, is controlled by its three trustees: Bill Gates, Melinda Gates and Warren Buffett. Other principal officers include Co-Chair William H. Gates, Sr. and Chief Executive Officer Susan Desmond-Hellmann (source).
Alumnus Grant McKenzie (PhD 2015) is the proud recipient of a Gates Foundation Grand Challenge grant designed to further the development of “a low cost and reliable technological solution to capture relevant data relating to the delivery and use of digital financial services in developing countries that is an order of magnitude lower cost, faster, higher quality, greater transparency/auditability, and more reliable than existing approaches which often rely on paper based surveys or in person data collection” (source).
“Access to digital financial services is fundamental to enable poor people to become more economically stable, prosperous, and resilient. Digital financial services – payments, credit, savings, and insurance offered through mobile phones or other technology – are reaching millions of poor people around the world that have never been reached before. Despite their promise however, digital financial services are still not reaching the bulk of the world’s unbanked poor. Data related to the delivery and use of these services is critical to unlocking key barriers to their widespread adoption, but current data collection techniques and methodologies data are often expensive, error prone, slow, low resolution, and/or unsustainable (providing only a snapshot of ‘today’)” (Ibid.).
Grant’s winning proposal, “A Social Media Data-Driven Platform for Informed Data Collection,“ was 1 of 59 winning proposals this year. As Grant describes, it: “The dramatic increase in social media adoption in developing countries offers an unprecedented opportunity to gain access to point of interest (POI) service locations contributed by local mobile device users. Through a better understanding of POI distribution patterns, on-the-ground data collection will be better informed, reducing data acquisition costs and increasing collection efficiency” (email to the editor).
The formal Gates Foundation description states: “Grant McKenzie of Spatial Development International in the U.S. will map the location of activities (touch points) related to financial services in developing countries by geosocial data mining, analysis and modeling to increase the efficiency and reduce the cost of data collection. They will first evaluate whether social media platforms such as Facebook, which include some geographic information, can be used to identify the location of actual touch point locations and from that develop a spatial regression model for estimating distribution in an unmapped, developing country. They will also develop a data collection platform that displays point of interest data for users to supplement with photographs and text, and add any unmapped touch points. In this way, unmapped regions can be easily identified for further exploration. They will evaluate the platform by surveying its performance in a test country” (source). Hats off to Grant and the rest of his team!
