Presenter:
Felix Schmieding, Senior Statistician, World Bank - UNHCR Joint Data Center on Forced Displacement.
Abstract:
Continuous conflict, persecution and violence around the world have led to a drastic increase in forcibly displaced persons, now standing at over 100 million globally - more than double the number ten years ago. The vast majority of those forced to flee live in low and middle income countries. The average number of years a person spends internally displaced is ten, for refugees it is twenty. This makes forced displacement a development challenge as much as a humanitarian concern.
Many host country governments are rising to this challenge, increasingly granting these vulnerable populations access to health, education and other national systems. While responses to forced displacement are evolving rapidly with increasing national leadership and ownership, data production does not yet mirror this trend. Refugees and IDPs are often systematically excluded, insufficiently represented, or insufficiently identified in the national surveys and other socio-economic data collection carried out by national statistical offices.
Challenging this, a small number of national statistical offices have begun to include refugees and IDPs in their national MICS, DHS, labour force surveys or integrated poverty surveys, providing governments with invaluable data and insights to optimize their response to forced displacement - embodying the Agenda 2030’s core promise of “leave no-one behind” and capitalizing on the recently endorsed International Recommendations on Refugee and IDP Statistics. Early success of this is being seen in Uganda, Georgia, Chad, Niger, Ethiopia, Iraq, Lebanon, and the Central African Republic.
This presentation will offer an overview of recent achievements, and discuss some of the technical challenges that were overcome; while also making the link between survey inclusion and SDG indicator disaggregation for forcibly displaced populations.
Bio:
Felix SchmiedingFelix is a Senior Statistician at the World Bank - UNHCR Joint Data Center on Forced Displacement. His earlier work includes assignments with UNHCR and UNDP. Felix has implemented or provided technical assistance to numerous statistical activities in Asia, Africa, and the Caribbean-including living conditions surveys, labour force surveys, population censuses, and administrative registers. He has worked closely with the National Statistical Offices and National Statistical Systems of various countries, building technical and institutional capacity. He has also held key roles in global processes aiming at the development of international statistical standards under the auspices of the UN Statistical Commission. Felix holds an M.Sc degree from the University of Oxford.