refugiados

On 24 February Europe entered a scenario that not even the data could have predicted: Russia invaded Ukraine, unleashing the first war on European soil so far in the 21st century.

Almost five months later, on 26 September, the United Nations (UN) published its official figures: 4,889 dead and 6,263 wounded. According to the official UN data, month after month, the reality of the Ukrainian victims was as follows:

According to data extracted by the mission that the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights has been carrying out in Ukraine since Russia invaded Crimea in 2014, the total number of civilians displaced as a result of the conflict is more than 7 million people.

However, as in other areas, the data serve not only to develop solutions, but also to gain an in-depth understanding of aspects of reality that would otherwise not be possible. In the case of the war in Ukraine, the collection, monitoring and analysis of data on the territory allows organisations such as the United Nations to draw their own conclusions.

With the aim of making visible how data can be used to achieve peace, we will now analyse the role of data in relation to the following tasks:

Prediction

In this area, data are used to try to anticipate situations and plan an appropriate response to the anticipated risk. Whereas before the outbreak of war, data was used to assess the risk of future conflict, it is now being used to establish control and anticipate escalation.

For example, satellite images provided by applications such as Google Maps have made it possible to monitor the advance of Russian troops. Similarly, visualisers such as Subnational Surge Tracker identify peaks of violence at different administrative levels: states, provinces or municipalities.

Information

It is just as important to know the facts in order to prevent violence as it is to use them to limit misinformation and communicate the facts objectively, truthfully and in line with official figures. To achieve this, fact-checking applications have begun to be used, capable of responding to fake news with official data.

Among them is Newsguard, a verification entity that has developed a tracker that gathers all the websites that share disinformation about the conflict, placing special emphasis on the most popular false narratives circulating on the web. It even catalogues this type of content according to the language in which it is promoted.

Material damage

The data can also be used to locate material damage and track the occurrence of new damage. Over the past months, the Russian offensive has damaged the Ukrainian public infrastructure network, rendering roads, bridges, water and electricity supplies, and even hospitals unusable.

Data on this reality is very useful for organising a response aimed at reconstructing these areas and sending humanitarian assistance to civilians who have been left without services.

In this sense, we highlight the following use cases:

• The United Nations Development Programme''s (UNDP) machine learning algorithm has been developed and improved to identify and classify war-damaged infrastructure.
• In parallel, the HALO Trust uses social media mining capable of capturing information from social media, satellite imagery and even geographic data to help identify areas with ''explosive remnants''. Thanks to this finding, organisations deployed across the Ukrainian terrain can move more safely to organise a coordinated humanitarian response.
• The light information captured by NASA satellites is also being used to build a database to help identify areas of active conflict in Ukraine. As in the previous examples, this data can be used to track and send aid to where it is most needed.

Human rights violations and abuses

Unfortunately, in such conflicts, violations of the human rights of the civilian population are the order of the day. In fact, according to experience on the ground and information gathered by the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights, such violations have been documented throughout the entire period of war in Ukraine.

In order to understand what is happening to Ukrainian civilians, monitoring and human rights officers collect data, public information and first-person accounts of the war in Ukraine. From this, they develop a mosaic map that facilitates decision-making and the search for just solutions for the population.

Another very interesting work developed with open data is carried out by Conflict Observatory. Thanks to the collaboration of analysts and developers, and the use of geospatial information and artificial intelligence, it has been possible to discover and map war crimes that might otherwise remain invisible.

Migratory movements

Since the outbreak of war last February, more than 7 million Ukrainians have fled the war and thus their own country. As in previous cases, data on migration flows can be used to bolster humanitarian efforts for refugees and IDPs.

Some of the initiatives where open data contributes include the following:

The Displacement Tracking Matrix is a project developed by the International Organization for Migration and aimed at obtaining data on migration flows within Ukraine. Based on the information provided by approximately 2,000 respondents through telephone interviews, a database was created and used to ensure the effective distribution of humanitarian actions according to the needs of each area of the country

Humanitarian response  

Similar to the analysis carried out to monitor migratory movements, the data collected on the conflict also serves to design humanitarian response actions and track the aid provided.

In this line, one of the most active actors in recent months has been the United Nations Population Fund (UNFPA), which created a dataset containing updated projections by gender, age and Ukrainian region. In other words, thanks to this updated mapping of the Ukrainian population, it is much easier to think about what needs each area has in terms of medical supplies, food or even mental health support.

Another initiative that is also providing support in this area is the Ukraine Data Explorer, an open source project developed on the Humanitarian Data Exchange (HDX) platform that provides collaboratively collected information on refugees, victims and funding needs for humanitarian efforts.

Finally, the data collected and subsequently analysed by Premise provides visibility on areas with food and fuel shortages. Monitoring this information is really useful for locating the areas of the country with the least resources for people who have migrated internally and, in turn, for signalling to humanitarian organisations which areas are most in need of assistance.

Innovation and the development of tools capable of collecting data and drawing conclusions from it is undoubtedly a major step towards reducing the impact of armed conflict. Thanks to this type of forecasting and data analysis, it is possible to respond quickly and in a coordinated manner to the needs of civil society in the most affected areas, without neglecting the refugees who are displaced thousands of kilometres from their homes.

We are facing a humanitarian crisis that has generated more than 12.6 million cross-border movements. Specifically, our country has attended to more than 145,600 people since the beginning of the invasion and more than 142,190 applications for temporary protection have been granted, 35% of them to minors. These figures make Spain the fifth Member State with the highest number of favourable temporary protection decisions. Likewise, more than 63,500 displaced persons have been registered in the National Health System and with the start of the academic year, there are 30,919 displaced Ukrainian students enrolled in school, of whom 28,060 are minors..

Content prepared by the datos.gob.es team.

According to the United Nations Agency for Refugees (UNHCR), we are currently witnessing the highest levels of displacement of people registered in recent history. In 2019, it is estimated that more than 70 million people have been forced to leave their homes, including 25.9 million legal refugees, more than half of them minors. Almost every two seconds a new person is forced to move by force as a result of a conflict or persecution, 37,000 people each day. More than a half of these displaced people come from only three countries - Syria, Afghanistan and South Sudan - and are mostly hosted by other bordering countries.

Open data and resources on immigration and refugees

All these data are provided by UNHCR itself, and they are useful not only as a first approximation to understanding the magnitude of the problem we face, but also as the first example of how open data can also be useful to analyze, confront and find solutions for the refugee crisis. And it is that the UN refugee agency has a large amount of open data resources related to the subject, including for example a historical dashboard of refugee movement flows or the map of refugee crises, through which you can access detailed profiles of specific cases. Other useful tools that they provide us with are the resettlement data search engine and also the indicators of drinking water, sanitation and hygiene (WASH) whose objective is to guarantee a decent minimum conditions for all the displaced. Its office for coordination of humanitarian actions also has a simple but very interesting catalog of open humanitarian data (which includes immigration) and a section with many other resources and tools.

In addition, the International Organization for Migration (IOM) - also related to the United Nations - has its own open data portal on migration that will be very useful not only when analyzing the variables that influence the flows of migration and the impact that these have on the most vulnerable groups, but also other certainly interesting aspects such as migration policies in different countries or the evolution of the impact of public opinion on the migrant group.

As we have seen, the United Nations, together with its partner agencies, is probably currently the most complete source of data available on the subject, but it is not the only one. Other relevant international entities also have their specific databases on immigration, such as the World Bank, although perhaps with more limited resources. There are also other non-governmental organizations, such as openmigration.org or the Internal Displacement Observation Center (iDMC) that offer us their dashboards to analyze data, their own databases, very useful infographics to make the problema visible, risk prediction tools, historical series of refugee displacements and fact-checking tools to verify, contrast and complement official data.

Reuse of open refugee data

On the other hand, apart from all the possible sources of data and tools that we have seen so far, it is also interesting to observe the use that others are making of those data and the other available resources. For example, some interesting use cases may be the collaborative analysis of the open images of UNOSAT for support in humanitarian crises, the analysis of the role of open data in the Syrian crisis or the study on the impact of immigration on the criminality in Hong Kong. Other examples are case studies published by some European countries, reports for emergency response coordination or, purely academic, the creation of predictive models of immigration flows made from multiple data sources, which include other conditions such as weather or relevant news.

Also noteworthy are initiatives such as Data for Refugees or HackforHomeless, which through practical and collaborative workshops (in the style of hackathon) foster a new approach to social impact through innovation in the treatment of refugee crises, using data as a tool to find solutions that contribute to improving the living conditions and basic rights of the displaced, acting in areas such as security, health, education, employment and integration.

Finally, although we have seen several examples of how open data can once again be a very useful tool when it comes to understanding and trying to alleviate the growing problem of displaced and refugee people, we must not forget that as a particularly vulnerable group it is essential to guarantee at the same time their privacy and the adequate protection of their personal data. That is why other organizations, such as the Center for International Governance Innovation (CIGI) or the Red Cross, have published their own recommendations to ensure privacy protection and avoide unwanted damage due to to the potential abuse of that data.

So, once again, we see how the greater the variety of data available, the more resources we will have to analyze, understand and respond to the problems in our society. Being able to guarantee the availability of adequate data is becoming a necessary condition when defining all types of public policies with greater success.

Content prepared by Carlos Iglesias, Open data Researcher and consultan, World Wide Web Foundation.

Contents and points of view expressed in this publication are the exclusive responsibility of its author.