Volker Schimmel is the Head of the Global Data Service UNHCR. Having worked on conflict and displacement research and policy in London, he joined the UN in 2003 starting with UNHCR in the Great Lakes. He worked with OCHA, rolling out the Field Information and Data Management System, and with the UN Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East (UNRWA) on camp improvement projects and innovative solutions to protracted displacement. Since 2012, when he rejoined UNHCR, he has worked in the Middle-East region and was the Deputy Head of the UNHCR-World Bank Joint Data Center on Forced Displacement. He is currently UNHCR Chief Data officer, heading UNHCR’s Global Data Centre in Copenhagen.
Episode Description
More than 117 million people will be forced from their homes or stateless in 2023 according to the United Nations Refugee Agency – that’s more people than live in the entire country of Turkey. Already vulnerable, refugees, asylum seekers, and displaced persons often experience human rights violations and the data of these displaced persons and refugees is the focus of this episode of Stats and Stories with guest Volker Schimmel.
+Learn More About Various UNHCR Projects
Mid-Year Trends Report UNHCR: Forced displacement continues to grow as conflicts escalate The number of people displaced by war, persecution, violence and human rights violations globally is likely to have exceeded 114 million at the end of September, UNHCR, the UN Refugee Agency, announced on 25 October 2023.
Read full press release: https://www.unhcr.org/news/unhcr-forced-displacement-continues-grow-conflicts-escalate
Read the report: https://www.unhcr.org/mid-year-trends
Global Compact on Refugees:
The Global Compact on Refugees (GCR) is a framework for more predictable and equitable responsibility-sharing, recognizing that a sustainable solution to refugee situations cannot be achieved without international cooperation. It provides a blueprint for governments, international organizations, and other stakeholders to ensure that host communities get the support they need and that refugees can lead productive lives.
Its four key objectives are to:
1) Ease the pressures on host countries
2) Enhance refugee self-reliance
3) Expand access to third-country solutions
4) Support conditions in countries of origin for return in safety and dignity
The 2023 GCR Indicator Report, which will take stock of progress towards the above four objectives, will be available on November 17th here: https://www.unhcr.org/global-compact-refugees-indicator-report/
Refugee Data Finder - This database contains information about forcibly displaced populations spanning more than 70 years of statistical activities. It covers displaced populations such as refugees, asylum-seekers and internally displaced people, including their demographics. Stateless people are also included, most of who have never been displaced. The database also reflects the different types of solutions for displaced populations such as repatriation or resettlement.
https://www.unhcr.org/refugee-statistics/
Nowcasting predicts the very recent past or the present - helps to estimate numbers in situations where statistics are not sufficiently timely. In humanitarian and development situations, where collecting up-to-date statistics is challenging, nowcasting can be used to overcome reporting delays. UNHCR has recently developed nowcasting of statistics on the refugee and asylum-seeker populations, with estimates produced for the previous month on a rolling basis. The latest figures available for September 2023 show an estimated 37.6 million refugees and asylum-seekers remained displaced at the end of the month.
Registering the birth of every child in a civil registry is essential as it provides children with proof of a legal identity, a prerequisite for the ability to exercise rights and access services. For children of refugees, the number of registered births is often unavailable, not reported by governments or not properly recorded in national administrative systems. To better assess the numbers of such children, UNHCR calculated estimates by imputing missing birth data for the years between 2018 to 2022. Using this method, UNHCR estimates that more than 1.9 million children were born into refugee life between 2018 and 2022, equivalent to some 385,000 children per year.
Predicting refugee flows with big data: a new opportunity or a pipe dream? – Read the blog by UNHCR’s data scientists to understand the opportunities for the usage of big data sources in the modelling and prediction of forcibly displaced persons.
Read the paper: Big (Crisis) data for predictive models
+Full Transcript
Rosemary Pennington
More than 117 million people will be forced from their homes or stateless in 2023. According to the United Nations Refugee Agency, that's more people than live in the entire country of Turkey. Already vulnerable refugees, asylum seekers and displaced persons often experience human rights violations. The data of the human rights of displaced persons and refugees is the focus of this episode of Stats and Stories, where we explore the statistics behind the stories and the stories behind the statistics. I'm Rosemary Pennington. Stats and Stories is a production of Miami University's departments of statistics and media, journalism and film, as well as the American Statistical Association. Joining me is regular panelist John Bailer, emeritus professor of statistics at Miami University. Our guest today is Volker Schimmel, head of the Global Data Service UNHCR, the United Nations Refugee Agency, UNHCR protects people forced to flee their homes because of conflict and persecution. Volker, thank you so much for joining us here on stats and stories today.
Volker Schimmel
Thank you. It's a pleasure to be here.
Rosemary Pennington
To get us started, could you talk a little bit about the sort of work that UNHCR does?
Volker Schimmel
Sure, maybe I will start quickly, where and how we started we we’re created in 1950. And it is really the UN agency who takes care, if you will, of the Geneva Convention on refugees, which is a 1951 convention, coming very much out of the experience of the Second World War period and creating an international regime for refugee protection. Later on. We were also given in the 1960s, the mandate for stateless persons, which is related but different. And then of course, in decades that followed the Geneva Convention also internally displaced persons became important. So individuals who are forced to flee but don't cross international borders. So over the years, we've gone through various phases and evolutions. And today we are a global organization that is present in 137 countries and territories, we have just under 20,000 staff working for the organization. And we are operational in over 500 locations, the vast majority of those are field locations. So you can think of them as capitals in either in or near conflict zones, or zones, producing a significant number of forcibly displaced persons. And very often our staff is there not just in the capital, but really, in remote locations in tiny villages who are talented, whose names few people have ever heard. But that's where people tend to arrive and find protection.
John Bailer
And, you know, as you were describing this, you were talking about first starting with refugees, and then moving to responsibilities with stateless people, and then ultimately, internally displaced people. And I, I found that to be kind of something that maybe people don't think about, that there are categories of having your lives disrupted. Can you there's probably formal definitions for some of this? Can you help kind of differentiate? I think I understand now the internally displaced or people that are no longer able to stay, particularly in their home, but are not leaving their country. Can you talk a little bit more about datelessness versus refugees?
Volker Schimmel
I'd be happy to, and you're right, it is often a source of confusion, and complexity. But I think there's really basic ways of thinking about this. So you already covered internally displaced people very, very accurately, I jump back to refugees. Here we're talking about individuals who flee due to or based on a well founded fear of persecution. This is the language that is taken directly from the convention, and reasons for persecution are listed in the convention itself. And then, of course, they cross international borders. And by virtue of having that well founded fear of persecution, they are refugees in the principle sense. Now of course, there are then processes that make a determination as to whether that status is a status that they should be accorded. This is where you get into this distinction between asylum seekers and refugees. So asylum seekers would be individuals who have a claim and then that claim is being assessed broadly speaking, but you can still think broadly speaking of that category as those who had to flee and crossed an international border, and then you have the group of stateless persons, the best way of describing that is actually, and it's not the only way. But a helpful way I find is to think of children born into refugee life. So a refugee, and you have a baby, if there is no mechanism to give you a birth certificate, or to give you any document that allows you to document that birth, then you will be in big trouble getting any significant documentation and documentation in the country where you are currently in exile, let alone in your home country if and when you manage to to return. And that's, that's a big problem, a very underrated problem, actually. But it's a big problem in the international protection regime that we support.
Rosemary Pennington
As you're talking, I wonder, what are the challenges of tracking these populations? I imagined because refugees, I know, often aren't stopping in a single place, you know, they're there. I know, in the case of Syrian refugees, they were moving through Turkey, and then up through southern Europe, often into sort of central and northern Europe. What are the challenges for your office and sort of tracking these individuals to ensure again, that their human rights aren't being violated and that they're actually sort of, you know, getting the support they need?
Volker Schimmel
That's a very good question. And it is something that is also a bit more recent phenomenon than the broader displacement challenge, I would say this is really something that we've seen, at least at significant at a significant scale, over the last couple of decades, just sort of in lockstep with with global mobility and interconnectedness. So I'm saying that also, because it's something where we had to, and are still developing new methodologies and approaches in order to tackle this, because you have to understand as a UN entity, and that's true for any UN entity, we're very much defined by date orders. Yeah, it's very difficult to think across borders. And we do that by virtue of our work, because we have often, we always have in the refugee context, a country of origin, as we would call them, a refugee quote, unquote, sending country and then a country of asylum or refugee receiving country. So we've always had that, at least binome of countries. But now that has shifted over the last few years, where you have not just one country of asylum, but you have onward movement. And so we have started for a number of years now through different types of work. Some of this is to do with our registration and identification work, where we actually get to see people who come to us not just once but of course, multiple times in various locations to be registered for protection services. And that allows us to have some visibility on that. We have developed survey methodologies in order to capture trends more than specific individuals' stories and pathways. And we're really doubling down on that, because it just, if you think of the Mediterranean situation, if you think of the Americas, that are really very big, we would call them route based challenges that really span countries, sometimes continents, and make sense of these flows. And of course, also, ultimately, the protection needed along those routes, is a big challenge. And I would argue one of the biggest areas of focus in our data and data innovation.
John Bailer
When you were talking about kind of one of the definitions of how someone could become online, or become identified as stateless and birth in a refugee context, you know, living in a refugee camp, and being born there, I was just thinking about just the challenges of trying to document you know, the people that are present in a camp, the the nature of their situation. So you have that pretty even with the birth, as you've just mentioned, but then I was curious about just people in crisis, people that may be concerned about trust and providing information in this. So how do you? I'm asking this huge question. And because it's in my head, it's still a huge question. So let me start with saying, what kind of things do you measure? And then how do you deal with the challenge that maybe there's something they're concerned about? What will my data be used against me?
Volker Schimmel
Okay, that's, that's a set of good questions.
John Bailer
Sorry.
Volker Schimmel
All appreciated. Let me try and tackle at least two and add a preface. You mentioned refugee camps. I think it's very important to highlight immediately that the vast majority of refugees do not live in camps. And in fact, thank you. It's not the setup that we would ever favor as a UNHCR. Either camps tend to limit freedom of movement right to why I can a number of other very important, in fact, enshrined in the convention and in the international refugee law and a couple of important rights and opportunities. And by the way, not just opportunities for refugees themselves, but also for the larger host community. So it's really important to quickly position that. Now, you mentioned the difficulty of identifying. So I'll start with that. And of course, in a cam situation, even if it's not the majority of our situations, it is a bit easier because you have a fairly well defined geographic space, often a space where we are also much more operationally active, therefore present. So the ability to interact, including on a statistical level on a data level with the community is much improved. And this is where we also then have some of our best data points and statistical work happening in these locations. It's a much broader challenge. And that's really worth unpacking a bit more, I think, in our conversation, when we talk about dispersed populations, because then you get into challenges of how many there are. And when you want to undertake a survey, what could possibly be the sampling frame? How do we go about undertaking surveys that yield robust results, and ultimately, should and will inform our programming ie what assistance we deliver where, or at least were first? So those are very specific challenges that we have some answers to, in some challenges as well. So that's on the sort of starting position of where our work happens and how it happens. Let me also take the second point, what do we measure just quickly, for quick overall take we do from a non statistical perspective, and that's more than or at least strictly speaking, that non descript perspective, we do also do registration, which is more a national registry type work. So not quite a census as much as a population registry, a CRBs. If you move it into that sort of realm, a civil registration registry and vital statistics setup. And here, it's really important to highlight that we do that because often in 30 plus countries, we actually issue documents that refugees then hold and the government or especially law enforcement at the police recognizes, it's very important to do that work because without documents individuals can show here I'm here because of my status and my situation, and I have a right to be here. And as a result, individuals are not picked up and thrown across the board. So this is a really important first line of defense if you will work when it comes to our protection, looking at a bit more ad. And this is an important set of data points. As you can imagine, including specific needs, we then go into specific protection work, social protection, social assistance at work. But if I pivot to assist the assignee to statistics, more broadly, the type of information that we're after, I really think that we know very well from the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals, right, broad indicators on well being. Sometimes we have a specific angle that we do, either enshrined in the indicators, or we have created our own indicators on quality of protection, since that is our mandate. So we measure those through statistical, in many, if not most communities, with a broad range of challenges.
Rosemary Pennington
As you can imagine, you're listening to Stats and Stories. And today we're talking with Volker Schimmel, head of the Global Data Service UNHCR, the United Nations Refugee Agency. When we first started this conversation, you were talking about all the different locations that that people are doing this research in the field for the UN, and among them being sort of conflict zones. And I wonder what particular challenges that people who are doing this work face and conflict zones? And sort of what you have learned from that work as an agency?
Volker Schimmel
That is a very good question. I could fill a whole separate answer, but I'll try to limit it to also our data work in terms of lessons. I mean, what it means, in terms of the natural limitation is the ability to move and to have access sometimes for security reasons when there's ongoing fighting, and sometimes for authorities as a national authority not allowing us to go into certain areas. Those are the typical limitations that we face when it comes to doing our work. And that the fact that of course, in any country forcibly displaced of any variety refugee status, or IDPs, carry certain political sensitivities and sometimes also very real security sensitivities national security sensitivity, so it is never an easy topic to work in or to broach on a data slash statistical plane. So To give you a concrete example, we have, especially early in the conflict, a new concentration of forcibly displaced, being able to go there can be just vetoed, and or we don't get permission to move by the national government. We had that in the Caucasus, we had that in the Middle East and Central Asia, it's very commonplace in Sub Saharan Africa as well. It is, in these sensitive moments, it's always very, very important to really position the value and the neutrality of the work very, very cleverly with the right interlocutors. So this is definitely something that we've learned over the years of how to do that and how to go about it, we don't always succeed, there are just situations, you can imagine the countries I'm talking about where this will just not fly. But we've managed in many other places. I'll add another challenge that is then more about the methodological challenge. So when we don't have regular access, or continuous access, but we might be able to have remote access, you get into ways of supplementing data collection, or at least initial data collections, certainly intermediate waves, through phone based techniques, for example, or other ways of interacting. So we're always very interested in ongoing research and practices in alternatives to the traditional in person interviews. And that's doubly relevant with a highly mobile population, not just in the sense of onward movement that we spoke about earlier. But also, there's always a high degree or meaningful degree of mobility even domestically, because, you know, the challenges are often that you can't even get a proper rental contract or find shelter. And I'm talking about countries where there are even rental contracts. So it's a myriad of challenges and problems that we face.
John Bailer
And I found myself thinking about the kinds of services that might be associated with the data that you collect. I mean, even providing some of the if they don't have a have this, some of these displaced people, cell phones, or some other ways that they can be connected is one of the ways that you might both interact, think about services, but also think about data that's that that you might be able to help collect from them. I also found myself just imagining this incredibly complex system of interactions that you have to deal with: the refugee, the asylum country, the host country, and how to position yourself to be able to work in this environment. What are some lessons that you've learned about how to kind of handle that I mean, that you, you and your organization have learned to deal with this to become effective in this role?
Volker Schimmel
We start with the latter, and then we can come back to mobile phones. And that also didn't really answer your question on privacy and concerns of that. So what have we learned in that sort of 3d Chess? Yes to play with international or state actors? Really, it is a matter of our ability to do successful liaison with the right interlocutors in the country, you know, not, it's not always the same ministry or authority, it depends very much on the domestic configuration. And we've really developed over the years, a good sense of auto through continuous presence, mind you, I mean, several of our offices are decades old. So to really have that understanding of the political economy of any given country, and also, by extension, any given region is vital. This is a key knowledge and key insight that we would be suffering, if we ever lost, add to that, that in order to move things forward to in a way seize opportunities in order to drive solutions and positive outcomes. It is often really about if not always about the opportune moment. And I think we have a maybe that's more of an unconscious thing that we've learned over the years, I would certainly say that it's it's something that we respond to very quickly and have a good reflects on it's to seize moments, whether the moment is and I don't want to sound morbid by saying this. But if you have a stalemate in the conflict, let's take a decade long conflict and then you have an external event that can be a natural disaster. Usually that causes total reconfiguration of perceptions. There's a lot of goodwill that comes regardless of the broader complex emergency and the broader political dimension of a conflict in the region. And that creates openings in diplomacy, thinking there's other examples like funeral diplomacy and things like that. This doesn't apply to ask, but I'm just trying to make a link to moments that appear due to external events that present an opportunity. And we always try to then use what we have to leverage these as much as possible to drive different ways of thinking about refugee situations, protracted refugee situations in particular. And a less morbid version of that is if there is a big shift in development engagement with a country, I'm thinking specifically of countries of asylum, so refugee receiving countries, and there is an opportunity to say, can we actually talk about inclusion of refugees in the job market in the labor market? This is hugely important. This is where we come back to statistics and data, because the intuitive response is always Oh, no, no, no, but zero is a zero sum game. If we let refugees enter the job market, then X number of citizens will have to leave the job market. Now, our statistical work. And this is where we've really built a lot of capacity and evidence over the last decade, roughly speaking together also with key partners like the World Bank, key research and work and statistical work in this area has shown that more often than not, this is not true. And that there is a really significant positive impact from refugee communities on the macroeconomic situation, there's also always a big impact on the fiscal side, I'm not pretending for a minute, there are no costs. But what's underrated is the additional demand side to the economy that is bought by refugees, the additional productivity element, sometimes there is a high level of skills that allows a country to open up an entire new, new industry. So we did great work in Kenya, for example, in Takana, research in that area on how that whole narrative can be can be looked at through a different prism, great work was done in Jordan, for example, which then took a milestone decision to allow refugees to end the set and to certain parts of the labor market. And there are many more examples. So it's really important to seize opportunities, and then be ready with our data and our statistical work to, to push that forward.
John Bailer
What's coming out in the near future that might help us understand the refugee crisis around the world better?
Volker Schimmel
Speaking of which, the other sort of story that would also fit with something that we're about to publish in November, is that there is a thing called the Global Compact on refugees. And the Global Compact is really a way of addressing the most recent period, I would say gross motor the last 10 years by saying, Okay, we have really an exploding number of refugees and IDPs worldwide. And we can't take care of all of them in one or two countries in the world. So how do we make sense of this, and the overall mantra is burden sharing. And it's a very big undertaking, a very, very ambitious one. But we have a key data piece, in fact, a statistical piece, the Global Compact indicator report that seeks to inform this, that's significant, because it's also, our journey as an organization has been one from just an emergency response organization with a lot of lawyers supporting the respect for international refugee law. And data and statistics was somehow always there, but not really front and center. And over the last 10 years, we've really invested heavily and transformed a lot of our work. An indicator report is actually a good example of how we're putting statistics front and center and not just counting numbers and putting out an Excel table, you know, once every 12 months. So there's really hidden under that the big transformation of organization when it comes to data and statistics.
John Bailer
Well, I like the fact that you're talking about not only do you do you quantify kind of what's the impact that's coming, but also using that as a foundation for saying the way that we have to address this is for burden sharing, or some other kind of, there's got to be some international response that has some coordination.
Volker Schimmel
Now, exactly. And if you look at the report itself, you see very quickly that it's about how much development aid or humanitarian aid is being provided, how much is being done at the level of refugee hosting countries to include refugees, etc, etc. So it's really that dimension of saying, Okay, there's a couple of countries who help financially, others helped by hosting refugees, and it's the collective total of that makes sense and underwriting that with robust data and evidence is of course key.
Rosemary Pennington
What do you think is an undiscovered story about the populations you work with that you think we should all be paying more attention to?
Volker Schimmel
Thinking on the covered story is really the upside and not just on a personal On a story level and sort of human empathy level, but really the collective upside, that refugee situations can also represent, again, not always in everywhere, but in certain situations and locations. Definitely there are capabilities, skills, levels of resilience that that I find inspiring, that really can be leveraged into, into a very industrious, positive movement, really. And we're talking about small medium enterprises, we're talking about really a positive economic impact on a broader community, ultimately, then also an a positive dimension that helps peaceful coexistence and making sure that families are able to access social life on all levels while in exile, as long as they have to have to be the in a waiting for solution by either going back or resettling to third country, whatever the case, right.
John Bailer
I find that a great point about demand side changes as well and kind of the value that's added by these communities that might be added. That's, that's really, really critical. I'm curious, how did you get involved in this? What was your journey kind of to become involved in, in working with the global data service for an international human rights organization?
Volker Schimmel
I mean, I started out being interested in international politics and aspects of international peace and conflict from a young age. I guess, as a child of the fading Cold War, it has that sort of positive outlook on the world. And I sort of carried it out through schooling and University, and I'm not a major in statistics or any any specialist I did international relations. And that brought me through the studies already into the sphere of forced displacement, early on, and then through various engagements, NGOs, think tanks, and ultimately, the UN and various UN agencies, I, I always had that. So that was more sort of deliberate and linear, the data angle is hardly and has always been an interest of mine. And something that I found useful in my work. And then it just happened to be, I happen to be growing in this quote, unquote, business, as also the world of data and capabilities grew if not exploded. And just because I was able to use that from really my first as we call them assignments with UNHCR, and sort of grow it over time, it became a natural fit for me to then also take on some of the more global challenges and this is how I ended up, yeah.
Rosemary Pennington
Well, that's all the time we have for this episode of Stats and Stories. Thank you so much for joining us today.
John Bailer
And thank you for the amazing work that you're involved with in your organization.
Volker Schimmel
Thanks so much, and thanks for having me.
Rosemary Pennington
Stats and Stories is a partnership between Miami University's Department of Statistics and media journalism and film and the American Statistical Association. You can follow us on Twitter @StatsandStories, Apple podcast or other places where you find podcasts. If you'd like to share your thoughts on the program, send your email to statsandstories@miami.oh.edu, or check us out at statsandstories.net, and be sure to listen for future editions of Stats and Stories, where we discuss the statistics behind the stories and the stories behind the statistics.