The Impact of COVID-19 and Use of Geo-Tagged User Data in Territories Without Planning: The Case of São Tomé and Príncipe

ABSTRACT

This work addresses the territorial organization, its interdependencies and urban development in a country faced with the lack of land and town planning, as is the case of the Democratic Republic of São Tomé and Príncipe. It is based on studies to unfold the potential of new mobile communication technologies and how they can be used to gain knowledge and approaches to different development challenges, mobility issues in particular. This work is backed by an understanding that territory is a resource and a strategic tool for tackling and providing responses to sustainability issues, and as the study shows, to better understand the outbreak of COVID-19 in a territory without planning and one eager to have information on which to base more rationale containing efforts. São Tomé and Príncipe has failed to design and implement sound development plans;public transportation remains one of the issues that suffers from the lack of synergy between urban growth and population needs. This contribution focuses on the feasibility of mining, visualizing and spatializing available 2G/3G geo-tagged data traffic minute-by-minute as a strategic tool to inform decision making towards implementing an interinstitutional approach to minimize the impact of COVID-19. © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022.