Meta + WhereIsMyTransport: Building a sustainable future with data collaborations
By Carlos Ahumada, Public Policy Manager EMEA & LATAM, Data for Good at Meta, and Devin de Vries, CEO of WhereIsMyTransport
It’s estimated that people create over one trillion MB of data globally every day, and by 2025, this is expected to reach 463 exabytes. Harnessing that data for good is an opportunity to make progress on global challenges ranging from the COVID-19 pandemic to climate change.
At the same time, the pressure on businesses to contribute to a sustainable future is no longer merely a ‘nice-to-have.’ Investing in sustainability boosts brand value, and helps businesses attract talent. A 2019 survey in the US found that over 40% of millennials considered company sustainability a key factor in where they work — a key insight into the motivations of a generation set to comprise over 40% of the workforce by 2030.
“Professional communications and good intentions are no longer enough.”
Prof. Knut Haanaes, Lundin Chair Professor of Sustainability, International Institute for Management Development
Solving real-world problems
Businesses are increasingly sharing privately held data to address global challenges. Data for Good at Meta is such an example, which leverages insights from the three billion people who use Meta services to empower nonprofits, universities, governments, and even commercial partners to make progress on social issues.
The Data for Good at Meta programme includes tools built from privacy-protected data from the Facebook platform, as well as tools developed using satellite imagery and other publicly and commercially available sources, which have helped governments, nonprofits, and private companies tackle issues ranging from poverty alleviation to water and sanitation. Among Data for Good’s tools are the High Resolution Settlement Layer, one of the world’s most accurate population density maps, and Movement Range Maps, which provide insights on changes in population mobility during the COVID-19 pandemic.
WhereIsMyTransport also believes in the transformative potential of high-quality data. Specialising in the production and maintenance of mobility and location data in high-growth emerging markets, WhereIsMyTransport offers Transit Data, Point of Interest (POI) Data, and Real-Time Alerts, as well as a consumer application — Rumbo — that uses this data to improve the public transport experience in Mexico City, Lima, and Bangkok.
WhereIsMyTransport helps fill critical data gaps in emerging markets, where anything from 30% to 90% of transport network data is missing from other providers. This data is accessible — in global-standard formats — to clients, product users, and project partners, improving returns, reducing uncertainty, and helping anyone making decisions informed by the pulse of the city.
“[Stakeholders] are often planning projects with incomplete information. When you’re only looking at 10–15% of the network, you’re only able to plan and make decisions with 10–15% of the information.”
Yohnny Raich, Head of Data Strategy, WhereIsMyTransport
Unearthing value through data collaborations
Speaking to WhereIsMyTransport, Danielle J. Harris, Managing Director of Engagement & Innovation at Elemental Excelerator, discussed the relationship between data and disruption forecasting:
“Today, we’re in a place of rapid change, and the pandemic has demonstrated the need for rapid response. Then there’s climate disruptions themselves: flooding, freezing, fires. How do you forecast the disruptions to come? The pandemic was a perfect example of this. How do people move? A lot of people were like, what does mobility have to do with a global pandemic? It has everything to do with it.”
Both Data for Good at Meta and WhereIsMyTransport believe that insightful services can be built on a foundation of reliable data. In 2018, WhereIsMyTransport and Facebook for Developers worked together to host the ‘CONNECT Hackathon Series’ in Kampala, Dar es Salaam, Kigali, and Nairobi, bringing a diverse group of developers and startups together to harness market opportunities.
In Johannesburg, Facebook and WhereIsMyTransport provided a platform to help participants build mobile solutions that combined both the Facebook Places Graph API and WhereIsMyTransport’s Transit Data. Avospace — a group of freelance software developers — won the competition, building a consumer app that facilitated payments between taxi operators and commuters via blockchain. Second-place JMR Software built a method to measure commuter risk for employees, helping them manage their daily commute.
Infrastructure impact
Meta and WhereIsMyTransport believe in data-based collaboration, which is why both businesses participate in the Development Data Partnership (DDP) — a global initiative to facilitate the use of third-party data to solve societal challenges. As a partner of the DDP, WhereIsMyTransport helped address a major challenge in Freetown, whose growth and development depended on the resiliency of its public transportation network. In 2018, the World Bank set out to assess how vulnerable the city was, however, as the city lacked complete transit data, an accurate assessment was originally impossible.
“The informal transit network of Freetown [has] little visibility to both city planners and the people it serves.”
Fatima Arroyo Arroyo and Xavier Espinet, World Bank
In response, WhereIsMyTransport mapped the entire public transport network of Freetown, Sierra Leone, and made the data available to governments, academia, and NGOs through the DDP. Thanks to this information, the World Bank team was able to accelerate their assessment. Together, the two teams worked to train university students from Fourah Bay College to collect additional information on both formal and informal public transport routes, which helped inform appropriate interventions and investments, enhancing the resiliency of their transport network, and creating social and economic benefits.
Similarly, when the COVID-19 pandemic erupted in early 2020, many tools from Data for Good at Meta proved invaluable to the World Bank’s global response. In Spain, participants of the DDP used Facebook’s high resolution population density maps to identify where additional testing centres and hospital beds would be needed throughout the country and in the Democratic Republic of Congo, World Bank staff used Facebook population density data to determine where additional COVID-19 hotspots might occur. These sorts of analyses have helped the World Bank better allocate over 150B USD in COVID-19 support provided to the developing world over the last several years.
Data is at its most valuable when it improves the wellbeing of communities
Collaboration between governments, international organisations, businesses, and nonprofits is critical for tackling the world’s greatest challenges — many of which are intertwined. When organisations provide access to their data — like Data for Good at Meta and WhereIsMyTransport do — insights from layered information sources can play a part in accelerating solutions to our shared societal challenges. And if our creation of data continues to grow, as it is expected to, then further informed, informative, and impactful responses are made possible for the betterment of communities around the world.
