Deep dive into Hanoi traditional markets


Deep dive into Hanoi traditional markets

Host Institution: International Center for Tropical Agriculture, CIAT

Location: CIAT regional office, Hanoi, Vietnam

Supervisors: CIAT, Vietnam. Louis Reymondin/Thibaud Vantalon, PhD, l.reymondin@cgiar.org/t.vantalon@cgiar.org

Project Description

In 2018, CIAT won a CGIAR big data platform challenge by proposing to characterize and monitor food traders, retailer and consumers food flows by providing free Internet to five wholesale and retail markets in Hanoi. The goal was to gather information by 1) asking one different question to the users at each connection and based on their previous answers 2) tracking in space and time all the devices (connected or not) in the range of the access points. By crossing the data gathered in 1 and 2 the aim is to model actors food flow and linked characters at key markets.

After 3 months with the Wi-Fi up and operational, the system scanned for nearby devices every two minutes and recoded more than 60 million single observations. These data allow us, for instance, to count the number of phones in each market at any time. The system also provided 44500 Internet sessions to more than 4000 people.

The aim of this internship is to deep dive into this large database to characterize the behavior of the traditional market users. This will be done by:

1 – Reviewing existing literature around similar approaches

2 – Defining indicators and metrics to describe users intra and inter markets behavior, in collaboration with CIAT sustainable food system group and the general office of statistic of Vietnam.

3 – Develop scripts to analyze the database and extract the aforementioned indicators.

4 – Present the findings into a technical report.

Project Expected Outcomes:

The expected outputs of this internship are:

  • A short literature review
  • A list of metrics and indicators together with the formal way to compute them based on the database
  • Scripting codes to for evaluating the metrics and indicators
  • A short report including an evaluation of the results, figures and tables

As long-term goal, the people and food flow monitoring system outputs, developed by CIAT, will be aggregated into key indicators to monitor food accessibility, availability and affordability for different gradient of poverty in Hanoi. These indicators will be made available 1) to the Ministry of Planning and Investment through already existing institutional communication channel 2) a web platform will be built to present these key indicators and make them publically available to academic, policy makers and the general public. 3) finally these data will also be made available within the CGIAR big data platform for agriculture repository.

Applications for this internship should be submitted via the online application system, stating clearly the title of the internship.

Deadline for applications: January 20th, 2020 – 11:59 PM (EAT).

Any inquiries about these internships should be sent to:
aims-ms4cr.internship@nexteinstein.org.