Data Capture & Analysis to Assess Impact of Carbon Credit Schemes

TL;DR

This paper presents an SMS-based data collection system developed for a NGO to measure the social impact of their green initiatives, highlighting design considerations and practical lessons from field testing.

Contribution

It introduces a novel SMS-based data collection platform tailored for NGOs to assess environmental project impacts in resource-limited settings.

Findings

Successful deployment in field conditions

Insights into mobile data collection challenges

Enhanced understanding of impact measurement methods

Abstract

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.