Maja Lazić, World Bank-UNHCR Joint Data Center on Forced Displacement: “There’s a huge momentum around the data that’s being produced on people forced to flee”

Data is a powerful tool in tackling poverty and promoting sustainable development. It informs governments and development organisations about the needs of vulnerable populations and provides evidence for targeted policymaking. But forcibly displaced people are often left out of the data governments collect. And when people are displaced for years or decades, the lack of evidence means it’s difficult to advocate for their social and economic inclusion.

Maja Lazić is Deputy Head of the World Bank-UNHCR Joint Data Center on Forced Displacement (JDC), an ambitious partnership set up in 2019 to tackle this problem. She previously worked in a protection capacity for UNHCR.

She says: “I’ve always engaged in advocacy with governments, civil society and other institutions to try and create a space that protects refugees, internally displaced people and stateless people. That’s a space where you have policies to make sure these populations have freedom of movement, the right to work so they can sustain themselves and access to social services. The latter means access to healthcare and ensuring children and youth can go to school. For the most part, I’ve been up against a wall.”

“I understood the hard way, from standing in those advocacy situations, that we needed socioeconomic data that describes the situation of refugees, IDPs and stateless people in a way that can be compared with the communities around them – local residents. When a government is producing a national development plan, I need to speak the same language as those involved in that plan on behalf of these populations.”

Informing effective policies

One of the challenges for both humanitarian and development programmes, is that those for displaced people and local populations often run in parallel. There’s a disconnect between the two and a lack of data sharing, even though most forcibly displaced people live in low and middle-income countries, often alongside host populations that need development support.

The JDC brings together a team of data scientists, economists and statisticians from the World Bank and UNHCR, the UN Refugee Agency. They’re working to improve how socioeconomic data on forcibly displaced populations is collected, analysed and shared. This, in turn, informs more effective policymaking that promotes social cohesion between displaced people and host communities.

Impact in Latin America

Over the past 10 years, more than 7.7 million Venezuelans have left their country – the biggest movement of people Latin America has ever seen. Around 6 million have settled in other Latin American countries. In Peru, Ecuador, Chile and Colombia, which host large Venezuelan populations, the JDC has worked closely with national statistical offices to collect data on displaced and local populations in tandem.

“We’ve seen an impact in Colombia, where the government has instituted very generous policies for Venezuelans,” says Maja. “They’ve seen in the data that a highly educated population has come into their country, with a significant proportion of women with children. They’ve opened their society to the Venezuelan population to contribute and become self-reliant, and for the women to join the labour market because they also have access to childcare.

“In Peru, the government held meetings with civil servants from various line ministries to present the results of the surveys and discuss ways to improve services for Venezuelans. The World Bank has also used the data to inform their programming that supports the Peruvian government to embrace these populations.”

Supporting refugees in Chad

Another example is Chad, one of the poorest countries in the world, which hosts large numbers of refugees from Sudan and Central African Republic. Chad’s government was already collecting data on refugees in their regular national surveys, but they wanted help to analyse the data and integrate the humanitarian response for the refugees with development programmes in the country.

Maja says: “We supported the UNHCR and World Bank teams to come together, where the World Bank team led this analysis, called Refugees in Chad, The Way Forward. They created policy and programming recommendations based on socioeconomic data and conversations with the government. Today we’ve seen $600-million-worth of investments on the development side that includes refugees in energy and social protection projects.”

These recommendations continue to be relevant as a new wave of refugees flee to Chad to escape the war in Sudan.

Positive policy shifts

Maja believes the improvements in data are driving positive policy changes towards forcibly displaced people. “We have a lot more evidence that governments, humanitarian development partners and the private sector can use to support their advocacy work, programming and policy conversations,” she says. “There’s a huge momentum around the data that’s being produced.”

For example, at the Global Refugee Forum in December 2023, 50 governments pledged to include refugees, internally displaced and stateless people in their national statistics. The JDC is currently supporting 16 countries do this work.

“This is tremendous,” says Maja. “It means that quality data is going to live, it’s going to be mainstreamed, and it’s going to speak to those governments’ policies. Ethiopia is a great example. They’re pledging to make changes in the way that they host refugees. And we’ve just completed a study in Ethiopia in collaboration with their national statistical office to feed into those policy changes.”

Hopes for the future

Eventually, the plan is for the JDC’s work to be integrated into the operations of the World Bank and for it to live on with governments and other partners owning and using the data. Maja would like to see this create long-term benefits for people who have endured years of displacement and for host communities that are also affected.

“What I really hope for is that what we’re doing in the JDC will help pave the way for governments, development and humanitarian organisations to have a lasting, positive effect on people forced to flee. When it comes to peacebuilding, we hope to quickly consolidate and support the protection of people who are bearing the brunt of it now, as well as developing back into something that creates a normal life for people. For that we need the data”.

About
The IKEA Foundation has supported the UNHCR-World Bank Joint Data Centre (JDC), which was established in 2019 with the mission to revolutionise the data landscape on forced displacement. Since its inception, the JDC has made significant strides towards its goals, particularly between 2021 and 2023.

Our support has led to enabling JDC to produce high-quality data and tools essential for understanding and addressing the needs of forcibly displaced populations, developing comprehensive training materials and methodologies for national statistical offices to use to include FDPs in their surveys. This has led to a significant increase in the availability of reliable data, which is crucial for informed policy-making. Last but not least, JDC managed to get the commitment from 85 host countries at the Global Refugee Forum 2023 to include refugees, IDPs, and stateless persons in their national statistics.