Chapter 8
Figure 22 | Demographic characteristics of refugee population by UNHCR regions | end-2018
Female
Children
57%
52%
49%
45%
44%
47%
49%
48%
41%
37%
Africa*
Europe
Americas
* Excluding North Africa.
Middle East and
North Africa
Asia and
Pacific
people, 86 per cent of the population. For age
disaggregation, this was 16.4 million people or
80 per cent. The coverage for asylum-seekers for
sex-disaggregated data was 48 per cent of the
population, and for age it was 46 per cent. Among
IDPs, sex-disaggregation covered 70 per cent of the
population, compared with only 30 per cent for
age-disaggregated data coverage.
2018 for more than 1,000 refugees, Serbia and Kosovo
(S/RES/1244 (1999)) and Bosnia and Herzegovina had
the highest female proportion with 58 per cent. This
was followed by Togo with 56 per cent and Nigeria
and Chad with 55 per cent. The lowest proportion was
reported in Ecuador with 24 per cent, followed by
Malta (27 per cent), Indonesia (28 per cent) and the
Republic of Korea (29 per cent).
Based on the available data, the proportion of
women and girls in the refugee population was
48 per cent in 2018, similar to the past few years.
Children represented about half of the refugee
population, also similar to previous years. It should
be noted that the availability of data on age is biased
toward countries where UNHCR carries out refugee
registration which tend to be lower-income countries
with a younger age structure. Therefore, it is likely
that the proportion of children in the refugee
population overall is lower. The proportion of
working age population (18-59 years) remained
constant at 46 per cent, and the proportion aged
60 and older was 3 per cent.
The proportion of children among the refugee
population also varied widely in 2018. Among
countries reporting age-disaggregated data for more
than 1,000 refugees, DRC reported the greatest
proportion of children with 63 per cent under the
age of 18, followed by South Sudan (62 per cent) and
Uganda (62 per cent), which reflects the young age
structure of the population of many countries in the
region. The lowest proportion of children in 2018 was
reported by Serbia and Kosovo (S/RES/1244 (1999))
with only about 1 per cent of the population, followed
by Bosnia and Herzegovina (6 per cent) and
Argentina (9 per cent).
At the country level, there was wide variation in the
sex and age breakdown of hosted refugees. Among
countries that reported sex-disaggregated data in
unhcr > Global trends 2018
These differences are also seen at a regional level
[Figure 22]. The lowest proportion of both children
and women was seen in the refugee population in
Europe where only 44 per cent of the refugee
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