Emmanuel Letouzé

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He regularly uses cartoons in his academic publications and presentations on data and development and in 2020 he spoke at the UN World Data Forum about the influence of his work as a cartoonist on his work as an economist.

Letouzé was born in Brittany, France and grew up in the banlieue of Paris, Sweden and Kuwait. After studying at Lycée Henri IV, he received a BA in Political Science and Economics and an MA in Applied Economics specialized in Economic Demography from Sciences Po Paris, the latter with field work at the Institut de Recherche pour le Développement in Dakar, Senegal, an MA in International Affairs from Columbia University School of International and Public Affairs on a Fulbright fellowship, and a PhD from the University of California, Berkeley with a dissertation on "Applications and Implications of Call-Detail Records for Demo-Economic Analysis" under the supervision of Ronald Lee, Edward Miguel and Jennifer Johnson-Hanks. He completed his post-doctoral research in 2016-17 at the MIT Media Lab in Alex 'Sandy' Pentland's Human Dynamics Group.

In a 2015 interview with KD Nuggets about the creation of Data-Pop Alliance, Letouzé said:

From 2014 to 2020, Data-Pop Alliance was hosted by ThoughtWorks in New York City. In 2018, it opened a regional office in Mexico City and in 2021, a regional office in Dakar, Senegal. Nuria Oliver serves as Data-Pop Alliance's Chief Data Scientist.

Letouzé is a Marie Curie Fellow at the Universitat Pompeu Fabra in Barcelona and the Director and co-Founder of Data-Pop Alliance, a not-for-profit organization focusing on Big Data, Artificial Intelligence and human development created in 2013 with the Harvard Humanitarian Initiative (HHI), MIT Media Lab and Overseas Development Institute (ODI), where he holds research affiliations as a visiting scientist at HHI, MIT Connection Science Founding Fellow, and research associate at ODI.

In late 2013, he co-founded Data-Pop Alliance and in 2016 he co-founded the Open Algorithms project (OPAL), which he directed from 2017 to 2020. In 2021, Letouzé joined the Universitat Pompeu Fabra as a Marie Curie Fellow.

Letouzé co-founded Data-Pop Alliance in 2013 with Alex 'Sandy' Pentland, Patrick Vinck and Claire Melamed, with initial seed funding from the Rockefeller Foundation. Data-Pop Alliance is a non-governmental organization with a global team and scope of work. Its aim is to "change the world with data" through three pillars of work: diagnosing local realities and human problems with data and AI; mobilizing capacities, communities, and ideas towards more data literate societies; and transforming systems and processes that underpin societies and countries.

I had the idea of creating 'something' like Data-Pop Alliance since about late 2012, after I left Global Pulse where I worked and wrote the White Paper "Big Data and Development" in 2010–11. That paper was my 1st foray into what was then a tiny field, and it opened doors. I was back in UC Berkeley working on my PhD in 2012–13, and was increasingly involved in the field as it started growing, talking at a few conferences, writing a few articles—and I wanted to build something lasting with a bit of a different feel and focus compared to what existed (Global Pulse, DataKind, for instance). I wanted to create something more academic with a greater emphasis on capacity building, on politics, and work with partners in developing countries

In 2011, with other French cartoonists he took part in the response to the first attack against Charlie Hebdo's offices, and contributed cartoons to the campaign for marriage equality in France. In January 2015, he published a tribute to Charlie Hebdo cartoonists titled "They Killed My Idols" in the Nib, and in February 2015, he participated in a debate organized by PEN America, the French Institute Alliance Française (FIAF), and the National Coalition Against Censorship (NCAC) on "After Charlie: What's next for art, satire, and censorship?" at FIAF with Art Spiegleman, Molly Crabapple and Francoise Mouly.

Between 2000 and 2004, Letouzé worked in Hanoi, Vietnam for the French Ministry of Finance and French Ministry of Foreign Affairs, leading a technical assistance project on Economic Governance with the Vietnamese General Statistics Office, Ministry of Finance, and National Assembly. He then worked as an Economist for the United Nations Development Programme in New York between 2005 and 2009, on fiscal policy and fiscal space for poverty reduction, post-conflict economic recovery, and migration as part of the 2009 Human Development Report research team. In 2011, he joined UN Global Pulse in the Executive Office of the UN Secretary General where he wrote the White Paper "Big Data for Development: Challenges and Opportunities". He was then the lead author of the 2013 OECD Fragile States report, which proposed to "move away from a “thin”, formal conceptualisation of fragility centred on the state, towards a “thick”, substantive understanding centred on the quality of state-society relations and with greater attention to potential stress factors, including economic vulnerability, demographic dynamics, climate change and technological innovation."

Letouzé is a political cartoonist under the pen name "Manu". He was the editorial cartoonist of French regional daily newspaper L'Union de Reims from 1997 to 2004, where he published over 350 cartoons. He has also contributed political cartoons to the weekly magazine Politis, news website Rue89, and to the satirical website Stuff Expat Aid Workers Like. He held a solo exhibition at The Invisible Dog Art Center in New York in 2011, and became an appointed member of the Cartoon Movement in 2012.

Emmanuel Letouzé (born 1975) is a French development economist, economic demographer and political cartoonist who focuses on data and development and the author of the United Nations Global Pulse White Paper "Big Data for Development" in 2012.