Research in UNHCR

Kimberly Roberson

UNHCR

International Conference on Asylum-Related Migration Research

May 2015

Role of Research – Evaluation and Policy Unit

• New Issues in Refugee Research• 278 papers since 1999

• Evaluations

• Publically available at Unhcr.org

Examining:• UNHCR policies and programme

interventions• Solutions, emergencies, refugee

youth, SGVB, external relations, and advisory functions

Observations

Information is power

Good information is hard

• Household Poverty (World Bank. WFP.

30 partners)

• Registration – individual data

• Joint IDP Profiling Service

• Statistics Norway – NRC – UNHCR

• Stanford, Humanitarian Innovation

Project (Oxford), Tufts, Brookings

• MED-HIMs

• UN Statistical Commission

• Innovation in sentiment analysis

Current ‘research like’ engagements

Operational Data Portals

Annual Statistics

Monthly Statistics

Data.unhcr.org

Popstats.unhcr.org

Current Situation

UnifiedApproach

OperationalStandards

StandardData Set

Generic Process

UNHCR’s approach to registration

The registration standards essentially define a process and a normative framework that ensures the rightinformation is collected at the righttime and in the right way to allow for status determination, planning of assistance and services, understanding needs and capacities, and working with partners.

They are applicable to registration irrespective of who is conducting it

Issues to be thought about

Ethical Issues of data collection

• Risk

• Proportionality

• Purpose

• Aggregation

• Changing relationship between

individual data and data capture with

‘big data’

How can qualitative data help solve data poverty?

Translation of evidence into policy

Empowering refugee communities to

research themselves and drive the

research agenda

Predictive models could look at modeling

needs and desires, and not just behavior

Mass movements and new data

collection methods

Data collaboration

Questions and discussion