Research Paper: Monitoring of the Venezuelan exodus...

In PLOS ONE, a journal for multidisciplinary research, co-founder of Data Culture, Vedran Sekara, has published and co-authored an article entitled Monitoring of the Venezuelan exodus through Facebook’s advertising platform. In the article Sekara and his co-authors focus on using non-traditional data scraped from Facebooks advertising platform for social good.

The abstract for the article explains the research as follows: Venezuela is going through the worst economical, political and social crisis in its modern history. Basic products like food or medicine are scarce and hyperinflation is combined with economic depression. This situation is creating an unprecedented refugee and migrant crisis in the region. Governments and international agencies have not been able to consistently leverage reliable information using traditional methods. Therefore, to organize and deploy any kind of humanitarian response, it is crucial to evaluate new methodologies to measure the number and location of Venezuelan refugees and migrants across Latin America. In this paper, we propose to use Facebook’s advertising platform as an additional data source for monitoring the ongoing crisis. We estimate and validate national and sub-national numbers of refugees and migrants and break-down their socio-economic profiles to further understand the complexity of the phenomenon. Although limitations exist, we believe that the presented methodology can be of value for real-time assessment of refugee and migrant crises world-wide.

Read the article here.

Estimating where and how many critical supplies need to be sent to Venezuelan refugees.