Data Capture & Analysis to Assess Impact of Carbon Credit Schemes
This work addresses the need for NGOs to assess the social impacts of green initiatives, but it is incremental as it applies existing SMS technology to a specific domain.
The researchers tackled the problem of quantifying the impact of carbon credit schemes by developing an SMS-based data collection application for NGOs, resulting in a system design and lessons learned from on-the-ground testing.
Data enables Non-Governmental Organisations (NGOs) to quantify the impact of their initiatives to themselves and to others. The increasing amount of data stored today can be seen as a direct consequence of the falling costs in obtaining it. Cheap data acquisition harnesses existing communications networks to collect information. Globally, more people are connected by the mobile phone network than by the Internet. We worked with Vita, a development organisation implementing green initiatives to develop an SMS-based data collection application to collect social data surrounding the impacts of their initiatives. We present our system design and lessons learned from on-the-ground testing.