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.

Johanna Ohm of Pennsylvania State University in the U.S. will produce an insect-based diet for breeding adult malaria-transmitting Aedes and Anopheles mosquitoes in the laboratory. Laboratory mosquitoes are most effectively bred for research using mammalian blood meals, which has numerous limitations including higher costs and requiring human volunteers with stringent regulations. It is known that some mosquitoes can produce viable eggs after feeding on soft-bodied insect larvae such as lepidopteran larvae. They will screen a selection of larvae to identify the most palatable insect-based diets, and evaluate them for effect on mosquito survival, fecundity and offspring viability compared to mosquitoes reared on blood-based diets.

Rohini Pande of Harvard John F. Kennedy School of Government in the U.S. and colleagues Simone Schaner, Erica Field, Natalia Rigol, and Charity Troyer-Moore will use an Interactive Voice Response (IVR) system to capture information on the financial access and practices of the rural poor in Madhya Pradesh, India. The system will also enable these people to interact with the formal financial system and receive government benefits. The rural poor in India lack a transparent, verifiable, and easily understood way to access information about account balances and the timing of direct deposit transfers due to poor literacy, and irregular service from bank operators. The IVR system will generate automated voice calls to individuals, providing personalized information on account activity and enabling them to give feedback on banking services through short surveys.

Frederic Pivetta of Real Impact Analytics in Luxembourg will develop a platform and applications to leverage data from telecom operators to identify individuals in developing countries, who are often women, without access to digital financial services. They hypothesize that these isolated individuals display unique cell phone behaviors that they can use to identify them. Once identified, they can be directly targeted with appropriate campaigns and products to encourage them to get beneficial financial services such as mobile money accounts. They will refine a predictive model to identify selected user features such as calling volume and social network characteristics from large datasets.