MTN Nigeria today partners Unacast, an award-winning location platform and analytics firm to help mitigate the spread of COVID-19 in Nigeria.
Unacast is a mobility data company that uses device location data, map data, and strategic intelligence to tackle business challenges for the retail, real estate, tourism, transportation, and marketing industries.
With its flagship product “The Real World Graph®”, it provides innovative solutions and insights to operational challenges for companies of any size or shape.
The partnership will provide this easy-to-use dataset on a pro-bono basis to enable public officials, public health leaders and other organizations, and the public itself to understand and convey the importance of social distancing in fighting the spread of COVID-19.
Reacting in the partnership, Chief Executive Officer Unacast, Thomas Wallet, said that “Social distancing has proven to be an effective tactic in helping fight the pandemic, and the Unacast’s Social Distancing Scoreboard has been embraced around the world by leaders, media and citizens alike as a way to convey its impact,
“The scoreboard is designed to provide actionable data that is easy for the public to grasp. We are honored to work with MTN to make this available to the citizens of Nigeria.”
The measure comes at a time when Nigeria’s healthcare system is strained with managing rising cases and protective equipment shortages.
Human mobility insights from Unacast’s Social Distancing Scoreboard will enable African public officials and the population to make informed and proactive decisions when navigating COVID-19 across regions.
Furthermore, as the Nigerian economy continues to grow, Unacast’s human mobility platform will also allow African decision makers to access data-driven insights for urban planning and development including real estate, retail, transportation, research and more.
According to Chief Corporate Services Officer, MTN Nigeria, Tobechikwu Okigbo, stated that “To fight this pandemic, we must work as a community, with government, business, the healthcare providers and citizens joining forces to practice social distancing and other safety measures,
“MTN is pleased to collaborate with Unacast by bringing this Social Distancing Scoreboard to the public as an important tool we can all use to flatten the curve.”
The Social Distancing Scoreboard will leverage Unacast’s Turbine platform for aggregated and anonymized telecommunication data via MTN.
Specifically designed for telecommunications companies, Turbine turns raw location data from mobile networks to privacy-safe, anonymized, and aggregated human mobility insights. The technology allows end users to distill vast datasets that accurately understand human mobility across a large area like Nigeria.
Unacast and MTN have developed the COVID-19 Social Distancing Scoreboard using anonymous aggregate mobility and device data from tens of millions of devices.
However, Unacast’s proprietary technology extrapolates the results to show trends by region. As with all Unacast technology, the Social Distancing Scoreboard follows local privacy guidelines, like the Nigerian Data Protection Regulation.
The MTN Unacast Social Distancing Scoreboard for Nigeria is the latest in a range of COVID-19 toolkit options Unacast has developed to help public and private enterprise, public health, NGOs and governments inform decision-making during the pandemic.
Recall, Unacast was founded in 2014 with offices in New York and Oslo, Norway. In 2019, Unacast was awarded the #1 small company to work in NYC for by Built In NYC and received Street Fights’ Most Innovative Use of Geospatial Technology award for its Turbine platform.
