  High quality census data are not always available in developing countries.
Instead, mobile phone data are becoming a trending proxy to evaluate population
density, activity and social characteristics. They offer additional advantages
for infrastructure planning such as being updated in real-time, including
mobility information and recording visitors' activity. We combine various data
sets from Senegal to evaluate mobile phone data's potential to replace
insufficient census data for infrastructure planning in developing countries.
As an applied case, we test their ability at predicting domestic electricity
consumption. We show that, contrary to common belief, average mobile phone
activity does not correlate well with population density. However, it can
provide better electricity consumption estimates than basic census data. More
importantly, we use curve and network clustering techniques to enhance the
accuracy of the predictions, to recover good population mapping potential and
to reduce the collection of required data to substantially smaller samples.
