Refugee Data Portal

Overall objectives

For UNHCR and its partners, the Refugee Data Portal represents a new ambition for statistics on forcibly displaced and stateless people: not just to document the scale of these challenges but also to help guide responses to them–responses that are more durable and sustainable. The socioeconomic and protection indicators on the portal will align with frameworks that governments, development, and humanitarian partners already use, enabling more effective coordination through reliable, interoperable open data.

The portal also responds to calls from global forced displacement data stakeholders who have long wanted a single, reliable place to find this information. 

Activity description

UNHCR’s Global Data Service, with the JDC’s support, will build the Refugee Data Portal as an interactive public platform. It will bring together UNHCR population statistics currently in the Refugee Data Finder with newly integrated socioeconomic and protection indicators, built to be easy to navigate and explore. 

The team will develop domain-specific data quality standards for inclusion and aggregation, drawing on international best practices, covering which data is included and how it is combined.  More information about the process can be found in this blog.  They will also develop, test, and establish data management protocols for incorporating survey-based indicators into the Refugee Data Portal and documenting them through a bespoke metadata standard. 

Engagement with partners

The UNHCR Global Data Service oversees the UNHCR Refugee Data Finder and the UNHCR Microdata Library. The team works closely with the World Bank and is engaging with other UN entities and development partners on needs, gaps, and related initiatives, as well as emerging technologies and standards. 

The portal is also about broadening who can use UNHCR data.  Converting high-quality survey microdata into statistics that are aligned with international standards makes that data accessible to a much wider range of people and organizations. Analysts can work directly with microdata, but many decision-makers cannot, so it is vital that relevant insights are processed into ready-to-use statistics. This means the data is useful to those formulating policy and designing programs and is presented in formats that fit the frameworks they already use, including the Sustainable Development Goals.

Background and Context

The UNHCR Global Data Service maintains the Raw Internal Data Library (RIDL) and the Microdata Library, which together make possible the structured, standardized and responsible curation and dissemination of UNHCR survey data. This responsible dissemination of sensitive data on vulnerable populations was made possible by a productive two-way collaboration between UNHCR and the World Bank, supported by the JDC, involving the sharing of practical tools, software, and advanced data protection approaches, as well as knowledge exchange on skills and governance. 

The reach of this work is reflected in how widely it is used. There have been thousands of external license requests for UNHCR microdata sets, and hundreds of thousands of views of the UNHCR MDL webpages. The data is publicly available and listed, documented and searchable using standards developed by development organizations and governments. The MDL also cross-lists relevant data from other organizations increasing its accessibility–including from the national statistics offices of Peru, Uganda, and Canada, international organizations such as REACH, WFP and IOM, and universities including Georgetown and Oxford. 

No other humanitarian agency has bridged the gap between emergency-response humanitarian-type data management and longer-term development-type data curation as UNHCR has, thanks to its technical collaboration with the World Bank. However, no statistics have yet been consistently derived from this data, and UNHCR does not currently publish aggregate socioeconomic and protection statistics for external audiences. As part of UNHCR’s continued data transformation, the Refugee Data Portal will fill this gap, making quality-assured socioeconomic and protection statistics available to those formulating policy, designing programs, and making operational decisions to improve the lives of those affected by forced displacement.