# Vignette 13: Serbia's depopulation challenge
Serbia is among the world's ten fastest-shrinking populations, with a projected 18.9% population decrease by 2050. Each year, approximately 120,000 people leave the country, many of them young and highly educated, creating critical skills gaps and threatening long-term economic development.[\[1\]](#endnote-1) "No single dataset has ever revealed the full depth of our demographic challenge," reflects Draško Drašković, Head of Exploration at UNDP Serbia's Accelerator Lab. "We needed to look at our population dynamics through multiple lenses to truly understand what's happening."
With Serbia facing this severe demographic decline, the Accelerator Lab experimented with new ways to capture and analyze migration data. Moving beyond traditional census data that only provided snapshots every ten years, they worked to establish partnerships with telecom companies and explored how social media platforms could help track population movements in near real-time.[\[2\]](#endnote-2)
Their exploration began by analyzing data from the World Bank-LinkedIn collaboration[\[3\]](#endnote-3), which provides aggregated data on skills and migration patterns. This revealed critical patterns: the outflow of researchers, international affairs experts, and financial services professionals to Western European countries, the United States, and United Arab Emirates. Building on these insights, they analyzed Google search patterns to track where Serbian diaspora communities were forming, discovering significant clusters of healthcare workers in Germany and Austria.
The next step forward came through a partnership with Serbia's largest telecom operator. "No one has ever given such a big dataset to anyone in Serbia before," Draško notes. The company provided anonymized data on mobile phone usage patterns covering over 270,000 users, enabling sophisticated analysis of internal mobility and migration trends.
To amplify these efforts, the Lab launched a Depopulation Data Challenge, offering $50,000 in prizes to teams who could combine traditional and alternative data sources in novel ways. The winning solutions drew on diverse data streams, from Facebook advertising data to satellite imagery, to create predictive models of population movements.
The captured data revealed surprising insights, such as the impact of COVID-19 on migration flows and the relationship between international collaboration and scientific productivity among Serbian researchers. Most importantly, the data challenge helped establish a sustainable approach to demographic monitoring by connecting private sector data owners with development practitioners.
{% hint style="info" %}
#### **Key takeaways**
* **Build data partnerships:** Establish clear data sharing agreements that protect privacy while enabling meaningful analysis
* **Start with a minimum viable approach:** Begin with publicly available data to refine research questions before pursuing more complex partnerships
* \*\*Combine multiple data sources:\*\*Layer different types of data to reveal patterns that single sources might miss
* **Accept necessary trade-offs:** Recognize when aggregated or limited data can still yield valuable insights without requiring the most sensitive or detailed information
* **Enable collective intelligence:** Create mechanisms like data challenges to tap into diverse analytical perspectives and methods.
{% endhint %}
***
## Notes
1. Also see Cerovic (2019) [↑](#endnote-ref-1)
2. For more information see the blog “How alternative data can shed a new light on depopulation in Serbia” by Vladimir Nikitović and Draško Drašković (2022) and the case study in our “Collective Intelligence for Sustainable Development” report (Berditchevskaia, et al. 2021,pp. 20-22). [↑](#endnote-ref-2)
3. See World Bank Group (2024). [↑](#endnote-ref-3)
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