Data and analysis

Reliable data is key for planning and monitoring solutions to ease the harsh conditions facing forcibly displaced populations, enable their economic resilience, and uplift host communities who live near them.

The importance of data and its protection is recognized by the Global Compact on Refugees and the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development.

UNHCR and partners, including the World Bank and the World Bank-UNHCR Joint Data Center on Forced Displacement, have intensified our research and analysis to expand the availability of socioeconomic data on refugees and host communities.

Making decisions based on evidence is key to building the resilience of forcibly displaced and host communities and monitoring progress towards these goals. Evidence also allows for more efficient targeting of aid resources. 

UNHCR, with the support of and in collaboration with the World Bank-UNHCR Joint Data Center on Forced Displacement, is working to enhance the ability of stakeholders to make timely and evidence-informed decisions that improve the lives of affected people. It aims to:

• Ensure population and socioeconomic data are systematically collected and analyzed;
• Facilitate open access to forced displacement data while ensuring the integrity of the legal protection framework;
• Promote innovations to enhance forced displacement data through satellite imagery, cell phones, and other new technologies;
• Strengthen the global data collection system, establishing common norms, definitions, and methodologies, and support efforts to fortify country systems where necessary.

Improving the availability of comparable socioeconomic data on forcibly displaced and host communities is a major area of investment for UNHCR, and the World Bank is a key partner.

Major initiatives in this area include:

• The inclusion of forcibly displaced persons in national surveys that measure poverty. The World Bank is working with national governments and their statistical offices to include refugees in household surveys. Chad, Niger and Uganda are examples of countries that have attained this milestone achievement. 
• Conducting reduced versions of national surveys as part of UNHCR proGres verification exercises. For example, in Kenya, similar surveys have yielded previously unavailable data on the living conditions and estimates of the poverty level of refugees in the Kalobeyei refugee settlement.
• Enhancing the capacity of UNHCR registries to collect more meaningful socioeconomic data. This ensures that corporate refugee data systems, primarily PRIMES and proGres, are capable of directly generating analytical insights that are useful to decision-makers.

We track the impact and the cost effectiveness of both UNHCR and our partners’ livelihoods programmes through a comprehensive monitoring framework. The framework uses a set of clearly defined impact and performance indicators to both guide the design and monitor programmes. Supporting the monitoring framework is a mobile survey tool that UNHCR field operations have been using to collect beneficiary data since 2017.

The impact of livelihoods interventions is presented through an open data platform, the UNHCR Integrated Refugee and Forcibly Displaced Livelihoods Information System, which presents performance and impact indicators in a standardized, systematic way that allows for comparison across countries and regions. Such results can be further disaggregated to view impact by age, gender, legal status, location and implementing partners. The platform displays results in real time, including anonymized household datasets for download, enabling timely adjustments to programmes.

Supporting the global rollout of the Livelihoods Information System, since 2018, UNHCR has partnered with the non-governmental organization CartONG, who provides training and other technical support to all global teams.

Further resources: 

• Overview Presentation of Livelihoods Monitoring (PowerPoint Presentation)
• Results of Key Indicators 2019: Charts – Blog
• Livelihoods Open Data Platform: Livelihood Information System