b. Creation of new states
For countries that have been divided into
two internationally recognised states, such as
Sudan and South Sudan, we consider all people
displaced within each of the new entities as IDPs,
and we produce separate estimates for each one.
People who fled within the previously undivided
state and who crossed the border that delineates
the new entities are no longer counted as IDPs.
Similarly, we no longer count people who fled
from Timor-Leste to West Timor when the former
was established in 1999. Their number has been
subtracted from our estimate for Indonesia.
c. Unilateral secession
For regional entities such as Abkhazia and South
Ossetia, which have unilaterally seceded outside
an internationally supported process, we do not
count IDPs within them separately from those in
the state they have seceded from, in this case
Georgia. In cases such as Kosovo, however,
where a majority of UN member states have
established diplomatic relations with a seceding
entity, we do produce estimates for IDPs who
have fled within it.
We no longer count people as IDPs if they have
crossed what has become a de facto international border and find themselves in different
entity from the one in which they were originally
displaced. As such, our estimate for Kosovo refers
only to people who have fled within the territory itself. Given that the Serbian government
reports all IDPs in the country as having come
from Kosovo, Serbia is not included in the 2017
GRID.
These decisions not to continue counting people
we previously considered IDPs in no way implies
that they no longer have vulnerabilities related
to their displacement.
tarian agencies operate, and the objectives
of their response and motives for collecting
displacement data.
Humanitarian agencies often have difficulty in
accessing to conflict zones, which can lead to
significant information gaps. Our sources tend
to monitor and report on displacement more
comprehensively in areas where IDPs are most
visible, such as in camps. In most cases, however,
agencies fail to record the geographical dynamics
of IDPs’ movements when registering them. In
other cases, such as Myanmar and Syria, they
collect data in regions that overlap, often using
different methodologies.
Data gatherers are very likely to overlook IDPs
living in more dispersed settings. These include
people who move to urban areas where they
blend in with local inhabitants; those who flee
to remote areas, such as the bush in CAR or
the forests of Côte d’Ivoire; and those who are
hosted by other families or relatives, as in the
Philippines. They end up unreported, and the
scope and nature of such displacement cannot
be quantified and assessed. Their number and
fate remain unknown.
Temporal scope and frequency of
reporting
The 2017 GRID dataset reports separately on the
total number of IDPs as of 31 December 2016,
and the number of new displacements during the
year. The former reflects the number of people
still displaced at the end of the year; the latter
includes repeated displacement or other movements of people who fled or returned home
during the course of the year.
Geographical scope and coverage
The figures reported are static, but IDPs’ movements are not. For this reason, we aim to improve
our methodology and increase not only its
geographical, but also its temporal coverage.
We plan to produce displacement figures more
frequently in order to capture the fluidity and
complexity of IDPs’ movements.
We aim to capture the full geographical scope
of displacement and strive to monitor and report
on all situations across the whole of each country
we cover. In many, such as Burundi, the DRC,
Mozambique, Syria and Turkey, however, data
sources do not cover all of the regions where
displacement took place. As a result, our figures
only reflect geographical areas where humani-
To do so, we will soon begin piloting a hybrid
monitoring methodology that combines eventbased and country-based monitoring of displacement situations as they evolve over time (see part
3). The idea is to identify events in near-real time,
manually verify those we deem to have led to
people fleeing and then engage partners in the
field to collect time-series data. In some cases
METHODOLOGICAL ANNEX
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