Doing more with less: Low-tech mobile phone methods for ‘hard-to-reach’ data-poor populations

Funding is contracting while acute food insecurity climbs - less money, more malnutrition. Yet the populations at greatest nutritional risk, geographically remote communities, refugees, internally displaced people, and rural women in conflict- and climate-affected settings, remain among the least monitored. Conventional enumerator-led dietary surveys are slow, costly, and often infeasible precisely when food insecurity risk peaks, whether during cyclical wet seasons, conflict, or epidemic-related mobility restrictions. The recent adoption of Minimum Dietary Diversity for Women (MDD-W) as an SDG indicator underscores the need for more affordable methods that can deliver near real-time data to inform timely policy and programme responses.

This seminar asks what low-cost, low-technology data collection can realistically deliver under these constraints. I begin by tracing the surge of interest in mobile phone-based methods since COVID-19: what they have been used for, where they have succeeded, and where they have excluded some of the very people they aimed to reach. I then present a method that turns the basic mobile phone, the most widespread communication device in low- and middle-income countries, into a dietary monitoring tool. Using automated Interactive Voice Response, women receive a pre-recorded call in their own language and answer simple yes/no questions using the keypad, bypassing both literacy barriers and the need for an enumerator. Drawing on validation against gold-standard weighed food records in rural Northern Uganda and formative research in coastal Timor-Leste, I offer practical lessons for leveraging phone-based methods in gender-sensitive, low-resource settings, and set out where these approaches are strongest. I close by considering how the same methods could serve as early warning systems across a range of applications.