Analyzing international airtime top-up transfers for migration and mobility

Abstract

International airtime top-up transfers enable prepaid mobile phone users to send top-ups and data bundles to users in other countries, as well as make payments, in real time. These are heavily used by migrants to financially assist their families in their home countries and consequently could be a valuable source of information for migration and mobility analysis. However, top-up transfers are understudied as a form of money remittance in migration. In this paper, we explore the determinants and the potential of top-up transactions to complement remittance and migration statistics. Our results show that such data can provide insights into migrant groups, particularly for irregular migration and for estimating the real-time distribution of migrant groups for a given country.