Fires, lights at night and mobile phone activity have been separately used as proxy indicators of human activity with high potential for measuring human development. In this preliminary report, we develop some tools and methodologies to identify and visualize relations among remote sensing datasets containing fires and night lights information with mobile phone activity in Cote D’Ivoire from De...

We investigate the relation between performances of speech and of song in the awosi dirge genre of Anyi (Kwa, Côte d’Ivoire). The relation between speech and song prosody has not been extensively studied, in terms of either structure or performance variation. We address phonetic issues of pitch height, tonal prominence, downtrends of speech in relation to melodic trends in song, and the phonolo...

The article outlines how we have identified the cities, city population, strength of social ties among cities, urban mobility in the largest city of Abidjan, and locations of residential and work areas. To deal with otherwise inadequate information contained in the D4D call detail records we introduced some daring assumptions and invented approximation techniques. Although further investigation...

In this paper I argue that Nouchi, a relatively young Ivoirian contact variety, is and should be treated as a full-fledged language distinct from French and its other source languages. Nouchi, an emerging language spoken in Côte d’Ivoire since that late 1970’s (Ayewa 2005), has been treated in the literature as a slang vocabulary or an urban youth dialect of French. Though Nouchi began as a lin...

Little empirical work has quantified the transitory effects of macroeconomic shocks on farm production behavior or on interhousehold differences in response to disruptions. We develop a simple analytical model to explain how macroeconomic shocks might temporarily divert managerial attention, thereby affecting farm-level productivity, but perhaps to different degrees and for different durations ...