Joshua Blumenstock, a doctoral student in the School of Information, has been awarded a National Science Foundation grant for his dissertation research on the economics of mobile phone usage in Rwanda.
As mobile phones reach the remote corners of the world, they have the potential to transform global development. Already, over two thirds of the world's mobile phones are in developing countries, and Nokia estimates that by 2012 over 90 percent of sub-Saharan Africa will have mobile coverage. Blumenstock's dissertation measures the broader impacts mobile phones are having on the agriculturally-based economies of rural Rwanda. In particular, he is exploring how mobile phones help Rwandans cope with risk and income volatility by increasing the efficiency of regional commodity markets and by allowing individuals to transfer funds over the mobile network to deal with temporary economic shocks.
Blumenstock spent most of this summer in Rwanda conducting a large-scale phone survey of roughly 2,000 mobile phone users, which will be funded by the NSF grant. He also hired and trained fourteen university students from the Kigali Institute of Science and Technology to work with him on the research project.
The broader goal of Blumenstock's research is to combine methods from computer science and development economics, to better understand the impact of technologies in developing countries. In addition to his Ph.D. from the School of Information, Blumenstock is pursuing a joint master's degree in economics, with a focus on development economics and political economics.
In March 2010, Blumenstock presented preliminary findings from his dissertation research, “Who’s Calling? Demographics of Mobile Phone Use in Rwanda,” at the spring symposium of the Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence. He will be presenting the paper “Mobile Divides: Gender, Socioeconomic Status, and Mobile Phone Use in Rwanda” in December at the ICTD 2010 conference in London.
Before starting the Ph.D. program, Blumenstock studied at Wesleyan University, spent a year as a Watson Fellow researching the digital divide in five countries on four continents, interned at Microsoft Research, was one of the founding engineers of HOTorNOT.com, and co-founded the website 10over100.org.
