Going data-driven on a budget
The Web Foundation is an organization many people are familiar with, due in some part to being led by someone like Sir Tim Berners Lee who is credited with the invention of the Web, and in other part to its central role in the development of the Web.
Although the Alliance for Affordable Internet (A4AI) is not as well known, this coalition of organizations is led by the Web Foundation and its mission is a complementary one: to advocate for policies for affordable internet access everywhere in the world.
A4AI is a data driven organization, collecting, integrating, and analyzing data on a global scale while working on a budget. In a way, this is fitting to advocate on behalf of those with little or no access to data. Case in point, recent results from A4AI show that the majority of the world’s population does not have access to affordable internet.
The process of concretely defining and measuring something as vague as affordability and using this as an instrument to communicate and advocate change on a global scale, while working with limited resources, is one that may have interesting lessons to teach. ZDNet discussed with Dhanaraj Thakur, Senior Research Manager at A4AI.
To begin with, what does affordability mean and who gets to define it? As Thakur explained, the working definition of affordability as proposed by the UN, or more specifically, the ITU, was that internet in a country is affordable if 500 MB of mobile data access for one month does not cost more than 5 percent of a person’s income.
That’s not a very good definition though, for a number of reasons. To begin with, as Thakur points out, 500 MB is hardly adequate — you can easily spend it all by watching one video online. And then, the 5 percent threshold is also not a very good one either. Why?
Because as Thakur says, doing a percentile analysis on income for countries where data is available reveals something interesting. If we take the 5 percent threshold over average income in a country, it may seem like this criterion is met, therefore as per the above definition internet access is affordable. But what does average income means?
To give a simplistic example, if a country’s population consists of 10 people, 1 of which has an income of 1 million and each of the remaining has an income of 1, the average income in that country is 100K. That is in no way representative of the income distribution in that fictitious country.
Using the wrong metrics in the wrong context and interpreting them erroneously has been called lying with statistics, and average income is clearly not a good indicator of the buying power of the majority of a population. Any data literate person realizes that, and the people in A4AI are no exception.
This is why they tried to come up with a more realistic metric, and ended up using what they call 1 for 2: for the A4AI, internet access in a certain country is affordable if 1 GB worth of data over the period of one month does not cost more than 2 percent of the average national income.
That’s not a perfect metric either, but as Thakur says their data analysis showed it comes closer. 1 GB is still not a whole lot of data to go by, considering the average use at the moment is closer to 2.5 GB. And then there is still the dreaded “average” there. So why not use a more realistic cap on data, and segmentation criteria such as percentiles?
Thakur explains that the data A4AI uses for income comes from the World Bank (WB), and the WB does not publish detailed data on income distribution. Why that is the case is a question for the WB, but that’s just how the situation is at the moment.
As for the 1 GB cap, Thakur said they considered this good enough for developing countries, which is what A4AI’s focus is on. But how does A4AI get pricing data for 1 GB data plans around the world, and how is that combined with average income to calculate the affordability metric?
The data collection part is, as Thakur explains, the biggest part of this effort.
