Moving towards data-driven policies for people forced to flee

Earlier this month, I had an opportunity to visit the World Bank-UNHCR Joint Data Center on Forced Displacement in Copenhagen, Denmark. We may be familiar with the aggregate number of forcibly displaced - as of the latest count by UNHCR this year, there are now 100 million refugees, internally displaced (IDP) and stateless persons. However, there are huge data gaps when it comes to the socioeconomic conditions of those displaced- their health, education, or income levels. This information is crucial to our interventions or governments to design policies. Frankly, without this, we are driving blind.

The JDC, set up in 2019, aims to address that need with a mandate to improving the quantity, quality and the availability of socioeconomic data on not just people who have been forced to flee but also the communities that are hosting them. The goal is to allow us to make evidence-based decisions that can improve protection and well-being of affected people.

During the COVID-19 pandemic, the World Bank embarked on high-frequency phone surveys around the world to understand how people were impacted. The JDC helped include those who were forcibly displaced in several of these surveys. As a result, more than 100,000 interviews were conducted with displaced households in 10 major host countries. This has allowed the Bank, UNHCR and other stakeholders to understand how this particularly vulnerable group fared in terms of work, income, food security, school enrolment, and health access, and allowed for better design and more targeted interventions.

With the number of refugees doubling in the last decade, the World Bank Group has stepped up its work on forced displacement. Since 2019, the International Development Association (IDA) has approved 56 projects worth $2.9 billion targeted at refugees and their host communities in 18 of the poorest countries. For middle-income countries, the Global Concessional Financing Facility has provided almost $800 million worth of grants, hereby unlocking almost $6 billion in concessional financing. But beyond our financing, as a development institution guided by data and evidence, we aim to add value through our analytical capacity. This involves not just collecting data but putting it in a wider development context for countries to access and use.

On my visit, I learned about JDC-supported work in Chad. Despite being one of the poorest countries in the world, Chad has decades-long history of generosity in accepting refugees. They now host half a million refugees. While national programming has census and poverty surveys to rely on, displaced households were living in the statistical shadows, leaving displacement-related programming to rely on guesstimates.

The Government asked the Bank and UNHCR on how they could transition from humanitarian relief to a longer-term development and integration plan. As a first step, the JDC supported the analysis of 2018-19 data from a groundbreaking country-led representative survey on Chadian and refugee households that was collected by the National Statistical Office (NSO) in Chad. Second, innovative phone surveys were carried out during the pandemic. Together, these two efforts allowed for comparisons of host and displaced populations on food security, income and education immediately before and again during the pandemic.

The surveys found that 82% of refugee households experienced severe food insecurity during the pandemic (compared to 54% of Chadian households). Data on poverty and income showed similar divergence between refugee and Chadian households. As a step forward, Chad passed an inclusive asylum law in Dec 2020 that guarantees freedom of mobility and access to health, education, and justice. The country is now using this data for targeting the Bank's social protection program aimed at helping host communities and refugees. Chad's NSO is extending its precedent of statistical inclusion; it is integrating refugees into the next round of its national household survey.

Chad is an example of how the JDC has supported the generation of data that provided unique insights to inform inclusive policy and programming that improves the lives of some of the most vulnerable people in the world. It is important to put this data in the public domain for everyone to access: thanks to the collaboration between UNHCR and the Bank through the JDC, UNHCR now has a microdata library with some 430 datasets from numerous displacement contexts. These datasets have been carefully curated, cleaned, and anonymized to ensure the protection of the individuals behind the numbers.

In another data-related analysis - led by a team of US-based researchers and supported by the Bank - studied the impact of the amnesty program implemented by the Colombian Government in 2018, which granted temporary work permits to nearly half a million undocumented Venezuelans. The study gave evidence to policymakers that the program did not have negative effects on host communities, which in turn paved the way for a second amnesty in 2021, granting temporary protection status for 10 years to all Venezuelans on Colombian territory.

With the war in Ukraine, we are witnessing the unfolding of a fast-developing humanitarian and refugee crisis. Our strengthened collective knowledge is now being deployed to offer advice to governments hosting Ukrainian refugees. We have come a long way in understanding what works, and what doesn't, in terms of policies and programmatic interventions to benefit those forcibly displaced, and their hosts. Solid data, backed by sound analysis is one of the first essential steps in that journey.