How I Used UNHCR Data to Learn More About “internally displaced persons”

A screenshot of a summary map of the UN Refugee Agency representing “Persons of Concern” in the Population Statistics home page. According to the UNHCR refugees, asylum-seekers, returned refugees, internally displaced persons (IDPs), returned IDPs, stateless persons, and other persons of concern, fall inside the “Persons of Concern” category. The database stores stats from 1951 up to 2017. You can use this faceted filter tool to get specific data and download it for your own analysis.

Note from the Editor: This post is part of a series, written by students of the Spring 2019 Data Journalism I course in the Newmark Graduate School of Journalism at CUNY, in which they share their work and thought process. Each week we have a Data Fest in which two of the class reporters present a data set, along with a brief critique and overview of what they did and discovered.

IDPs, also know as internally displaced persons, is not a common term used in the news. However, it’s a situation that affects nearly 40 million people worldwide.

IDPs are in a dire predicament very similar to other terms that make headlines daily like refugees and asylum seekers. IDPs are people who are displaced from their home — like refugees and asylum seekers — for various reasons ranging from war and political tensions to famines and droughts. Unlike refugees, who leave their homes to look for asylum in other countries, IDPs are displaced but remain in their home country.

To learn more about this little-spoken-about subset of individuals, I dove into a vast data set on UNHCR. There I was able to extract vital pieces of information like where the most IDPs are located: Syria, Iraq, Afghanistan, Democratic Republic of the Congo, to name a few.

I also saw a startling trend in the data. The rate of IDPs has been rising exponentially since the United Nations started tracking this. In 1993, there were approximately 4 million reported IDPs. In 2017 (latest year with available data), there were nearly 40 million.

By speaking with experts I was able to gain key insights and context to this that I wouldn’t have been able to extract from numbers alone.

For one, I learned that one reason for the steep rise in IDPs is the increasing effectiveness of the data collection itself. The UN is working every year to set standards for data collection for IDPs and guidelines and rules for how countries should be reporting these numbers. Therefore, experts said that, say 10 years ago, the number cited is probably muted due to poorer data collection processes.

But they also spoke of the state of the world during different periods of times. It was no surprise that the numbers shot up in the early 2000s as Northern Africa and the Middle East became more destabilized by wars.

Using maps and graphs, through Datawrapper, I did my best to take a data snapshot of the state of IDPs in 2017 and prepare a set of questions about what the data means and where its holes and pitfalls may be. And, most importantly, to highlight and raise awareness of the plight of millions of people who today are desperately waiting for aid and refuge from war, famine and other global strifes that plague our planet today.