It took a devastating photograph to get the world to pay attention.
The image of 3-year-old Syrian refugee Alan Kurdi went viral in September 2015, showing the toddler's lifeless body washed ashore in Turkey after his family tried to make the perilous journey across the Mediterranean Sea to find safety in Greece. It was a wake-up call for the international community, particularly people in rich, developed nations who had yet to grasp the scope of continued human suffering caused by the years-long Syrian conflict.
But today, as more than 22.5 million people have fled countries like Syria, South Sudan, and Myanmar because of civil war, famine, and ethnic cleansing, sentiment around the crisis has become nearly as complex as the crisis itself. Politicians continue to spout harmful rhetoric that stokes fears and misconceptions about refugees and migrants, while people who dowant to help often resign themselves to feeling that it's an intractable issue — too overwhelming to make a difference.
SEE ALSO:Millions of refugees could benefit from big data — but we're not using itA new initiative may renew some hope. Two major players in the humanitarian aid and development spaces just forged a partnership to find innovative solutions to the refugee crisis, and they're using big data and tech to do it.
"We still have quite a gap between the present situation and a data structure that allows us to have all-the-time, real-time access to information on refugees."
The United Nations Refugee Agency (UNHCR) and the World Bank Group signed an agreement last Friday to establish a new center that aims to improve the collection, analysis, and dissemination of data around refugees. The goal is to prompt a better global response to forced displacement and more informed policies, ultimately leading to stronger and smarter assistance for both refugees and the communities that host them.
The Joint Data Center on Forced Displacement builds on previous work between UNHCR and the World Bank, with the mission of making "timely and evidence-informed decisions that can improve the lives of affected people." It will establish a standard, sustainable collection system to analyze population and socioeconomic data, including important info around gender, age, income, skills, and health. The center will also anonymize that data (to ensure refugees are protected) and make them open-access to help aid groups and policymakers. Lastly, the center will promote innovative, tech-focused uses of this information in order to help refugees, internally displaced persons, stateless people, returnees, asylum-seekers, and host populations.
The initiative isn't just a concept; the data center will also be a physical structure that will be built later this year and become operational in 2019. Its location is still being discussed, but it will likely be headquartered in Europe.
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The Joint Data Center couldn't come at a more urgent time. As of last year, an estimated 65.6 million people were forcibly displaced around the world. Because of recent crises like the one involving the Rohingya, a Muslim ethnic minority forced to flee Myanmar due to persecution, U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees Filippo Grandi expects that number to increase when UNHCR publishes its annual figures in June.
"I think that we still have quite a gap between the present situation and a data structure that allows us to have all-the-time, real-time access to information on refugees," Grandi said in an exclusive interview with Mashable.
For decades, he explained, UNHCR has treated the refugee crisis as a humanitarian issue, with a focus on blankets, food, and shelter, as well as protection and legal assistance. But while those types of aid are vital, they don't address the intense strains on poor host countries, from educational needs to environmental impacts. They also don't change the fact that when it comes to prolonged crises (think Somalia or Afghanistan), refugees are displaced for an average of 26 years.
If aid organizations like UNHCR want to tailor sophisticated assistance to the specific needs of refugees and the communities hosting them, Grandi said, they need to "step up the quality and speed" of the information they have.
"We decided that it was time to partner with development agencies. And development agencies realized that without addressing forced displacement, their own development agenda was diminished and flattened," Grandi said.
Left:A closeup of the Cox's Bazar area of Bangladesh, without shelters, on May 25, 2017.Credit: DigitalGlobeRight:The same area with Rohingya shelters at the Kutupalong refugee camp on Sept. 25, 2017.Credit: DigitalGlobeThe agreement, signed Friday by Grandi and World Bank Group CEO Kristalina Georgieva, formalizes the two organizations' collaborative efforts, playing off each other's strengths.
"We live in a world that is becoming richer but more fragile at the same time, as we see with the growing forced displacement crisis," Georgieva told Mashable in a statement. "Our work is rooted in evidence, and by joining hands with UNHCR, we can improve the quality and quantity of data on refugees to make sure that policies and programs help those in need — both refugees and host communities."
"We can improve the quality and quantity of data on refugees to make sure that policies and programs help those in need."
While the partnership is still a work in progress, there are already examples of Joint Data Center's impact. In 2016, UNHCR realized that millions of Syrian refugee children were missing entire school cycles in their host countries. But in order to integrate so many additional children into a given country's school system, UNHCR needed national data it didn't have. The World Bank did have that data, so the two organizations joined forces and, according to Grandi, were able to facilitate a very significant increase of Syrian children going to school in Jordan, fairly significant in Turkey, and growing in Lebanon.
Another example is Bangladesh, which is even more complex due to the rapid and massive nature of the Rohingya crisis. Bangladesh is a poor country, and most of the refugees are hosted in Cox's Bazar, a particularly poor and vulnerable district. Bangladesh recently agreed to request aid from the World Bank through the organization's refugee window, a fund that offers substantive resources to the poorest countries. In collaboration with UNHCR, the money can create effective solutions around health, education, water, sanitation, and roads to help with the influx of Rohingya refugees.
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If the idea to get smarter about data seems long overdue, you're not alone. Statistics have been a crucial aspect of finding trends among refugee flows and migration patterns, and have helped find better ways to provide aid. But some experts have urged aid groups and policymakers to tap into big data's potential to predict future outcomes -- something the new UNHCR-World Bank partnership aims to finally do.
Anirudh Ruhil, a professor at Ohio University's Voinovich School of Leadership and Public Affairs, is an expert in predictive analytics who earlier this year published an article titled, "Millions of refugees could benefit from big data — but we're not using it." In the piece, he highlights big data's potential to anticipate problems within the refugee crisis before they happen, and outlines the roadblocks to implementing such a system.
Ruhil, who was not involved with the Joint Data Center, said he thinks it's a great idea in the making.
"This is a new era, a new paradigm developing at a time when we are most likely to see larger numbers fleeing places."
"I cannot help but think that if the system were in place, we would have seen fewer migrants perish in the Mediterranean," Ruhil said via email. "This is a new era, a new paradigm developing at a time when we are most likely to see larger numbers fleeing places due either to civil strife or other domestic political/social unrest or ... because of climate change."
However, Ruhil does look at the initiative with a healthy dose of skepticism. For one thing, he's not sure how refugees will feel about the data.
"If I am a Syrian refugee or a Rohingya fleeing oppression, do I want to give you the right to any details about me that could be out there for someone to grab? Yes, we know they will be scrubbed and anonymized in the database, but how do I know the system is foolproof? Do I have the legal rights to say no? To not participate? Or will my refugee benefits be tied to participation?"
These are all hypotheticals, of course, but Ruhil said it's important to consider the slippery slope that "separates a monitoring and evaluation system from a surveillance system" — something that's a challenge, no matter the cause. You would run into the same issues when establishing a database for a hospital group's patients, for a business' billing purposes, or for educational accountability in a given state.
SEE ALSO:Follow the desperate flight of Rohingya refugees with this moving mapRuhil also wonders about how the data center will work in tandem with host countries' own systems of data collection, and if making the information open-access will be too mired in legal morass to be successful.
"My one wish here is that none of these issues materialize, because what is being envisioned is so radical that it should work," Ruhil said.
A group of students in a school at the Rhino Refugee Camp in northern Uganda on Aug. 9, 2017. Here, children of local people and refugees from South Sudan are taught together.Credit: Thomas Koehler / Photothek / Getty Images"Radical" is a good term for the initiative, and it could also describe various other UNHCR efforts around technology. From biometric registration to digital eye scanners for food payments to direct cash-aid cards to a collaboration with Vodafone to provide "Instant Schools" in rural areas, the U.N. Refugee Agency is no stranger to using cutting-edge tech to provide refugees with more efficient, more dignified aid.
It's with that ethos that UNHCR and the World Bank have entered this new cooperation. Grandi said that the Joint Data Center will help give a "better voice to refugees," and by including them in the data collection process, they'll have more say in addressing their needs at the planning stage.
"It's a game-changer. It is not the final solution."
More accurate data also means a lot for everyday citizens — those same people who worry the refugee crisis is an unsolvable problem. Better data will uncover specific needs for refugees, rooting assistance reality. If you donate $1 to an organization that responds to the refugee crisis, for example, better data will ensure that dollar is better spent. Even when all hope seems lost, this could inspire further action from the average person.
"So often I am told when I go around the world and I give interviews and I meet people, the refugee problem seems to grow and grow and grow," Grandi said. "True. But people are asking, is this really something we can respond to? Is there a way to respond?"
Grandi's answer is that it's challenging, but while it ultimately requires political solutions for the crises to be resolved for good, efforts like the Joint Data Center can offer new avenues to help everyone involved.
"This new dimension that we're opening up — this longer-term access to development resources — is really what can make a difference," he said.
"It's a game-changer. It is not the final solution ... But in the meantime, we're providing a response to give people a better life, and maybe some hope and opportunities during this difficult time."
TopicsActivismSocial GoodUnited Nations
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