New research suggests that mobile phone data could help bring electricity to the developing word.

Researchers at Santa Fe Institute in the U.S., the University of Manchester in the U.K., and the Université Cheikh Anta Diop in Senegal used anonymized cell phone data to assess the feasibility of various electrification options for rural communities in Senegal.

Lack of quality demographic data is a major obstacle to infrastructure planning in the developing world. Researchers proposed that cell phone data be used to help developing countries plan electrical infrastructure based on population distribution and projected energy consumption.

More 70 percent of Senegal's rural population lacks access to electricity, and the difficulty of predicting their potential electricity consumption discourages costly infrastructure investments. Nearly all Senegalese carry cell phones, however, and the country has become inundated with cell towers -- many of them running on their own diesel generators.

For the study, researchers measured the cell phone activity at each tower, gaining unprecedented knowledge into where and when human activity takes place.

"This new, data-driven insight into the population dynamics allows us to predict local infrastructure needs with an accuracy that has never been possible before," Markus Schläpfer, one of the study's co-authors and a postdoctoral fellow at the Santa Fe Institute, said in a statement.

Their predictions were used to inform different planning scenarios for electrification options such as new power lines or photovoltaics-based microgrids.