The Democratic Republic of the Congo (DR Congo) is confronting its largest and deadliest Ebola outbreak since the disease was first recorded in the country between August and November 1976. Officially declared on May 17, 2026, the outbreak is the country's 17th and has infected 6,250 people, with 3,039 deaths, according to official data.

One of the greatest challenges facing health officials in combating the virus is controlling its spread. With crowds in public places, social gatherings, and communities nearly impossible to police, the virus continues to circulate.

The outbreak is unfolding amid violence linked to armed groups. Dozens of armed groups operate in eastern provinces such as Ituri and North Kivu, two Ebola-hit areas. Their activities — including violence, attacks on treatment centres, and displacement — make it dangerous and difficult for health workers to reach people who have contracted the disease.

Efforts to control the disease, caused by the Bundibugyo virus, have so far been largely unsuccessful. Beyond rebel attacks and limited facilities, the Bundibugyo virus has no approved and widely available commercial vaccine, forcing health workers to rely strictly on supportive symptom care.

Among all the challenges, the greatest threat is curbing Ebola's spread. Preventing transmission would allow the country's limited resources to be focused on treating those already affected.

Mobile data as a tracking tool

Health officials are now turning to technology to combat the spread, using anonymised mobile phone data supported by telecom tower networks. With no nationwide lockdown restricting movement or public assembly, officials instead rely on monitoring people's movements.

Through this tool, they track people moving from an Ebola-hit community into another community, turning the destination into a target point and red zone where the disease could spread next.

The Swedish non-profit organisation Flowminder partnered with Vodacom DRC to provide the anonymised mobile-phone data, according to Reuters. The information is used to map population movements and identify areas where the Ebola virus could spread next.

This is not the first time mobility data has been deployed against epidemics: Flowminder previously used call detail records to map population movements during the 2010 Haiti cholera outbreak and the 2014–2016 West Africa Ebola epidemic, an approach that has since become an established part of the public health toolkit.

Data protection safeguards

By anonymising the data, the organisations have taken subscribers' data protection into consideration. The information available to health workers has been purged of personal identifiers such as names, phone numbers, email addresses, or government IDs. Instead, workers see only coded entries such as "Person 1412".

Flowminder says it receives aggregated and anonymised records and does not have access to information identifying individual subscribers.

"We seek to provide estimates of how people move, which in turn is a predictor of how infectious people move," Flowminder founder Linus Bengtsson told Reuters.

Traditional risk assessments focus on outbreak hotspots — places with the largest number of infections — and assume the virus is most likely to spread to surrounding areas. With the new tool's analysis of mobility data, health workers can identify risks in other places as well.

"It gives us a more nuanced understanding of risk," said Olivier Le Polain, head of epidemiology and analytics for response at the WHO Health Emergencies Programme.

How it works

Anonymised records are generated when mobile phone users connect to telecom towers. As people move around the country, their phones connect to different towers, generating records that show where those connections took place and how people moved. Researchers and health workers then use these records to estimate travel between areas and where the outbreak could strike next — a capability that becomes vital when tracking people moving from a highly affected zone to another community.

In its first analysis, published in June, Flowminder focused on Bunia, Mongbwalu, and Rwampara, the three areas where the outbreak is believed to have started. Researchers tracked where people who had spent time in those areas between April 3 and April 23 subsequently travelled. The findings showed the largest movements were to nearby areas in Ituri Province and North Kivu Province.

Subsequent events confirmed the findings' accuracy: by the end of June, all 10 destinations that received the largest flows of travellers from the original outbreak areas had reported confirmed Ebola cases.

Recognising that this approach can only respond after the damage is done, Flowminder expanded the analysis to examine where people leaving those hotspots were most likely to travel, predicting destinations based on past patterns of movement.

Le Polain said Kisangani has drawn attention recently. A major transport hub on the Congo River connecting eastern and western Congo, Kisangani's elevated risk was not a huge surprise even though it does not border the affected areas, because of its attractiveness for public gatherings.

"By mid-June, the data showed the risk was significant and that the outbreak could spread there faster than we initially thought. We strengthened operations there before the first cases were detected," Le Polain said.

Coverage gap

The tool nonetheless faces a critical challenge: a coverage gap. Flowminder partnered only with Vodacom, leaving subscribers of competitors such as Airtel, Orange, and Africell outside the monitoring system. While Vodacom is the country's largest operator, with more than 26 million active subscriptions and a market share of nearly 35%, the analysis cannot capture the entire population. Officials noted, however, that efforts are underway to secure similar partnerships with other telecom operators.

Despite this limitation, the tool demonstrates how technology has evolved to help address natural disasters — and it is currently saving lives in the DR Congo. What to watch next is whether the additional operator partnerships materialise, which would widen the mobility picture beyond Vodacom's subscriber base.