Which global frameworks signal a commitment to migration data?

2030 Sustainable Development Goals

The 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development, adopted by all United Nations members in 2015, provides a blueprint for current and future peace and prosperity for people and the planet. The 17 SDGs to which member states have pledged recognize that ending poverty and other deprivations must go hand-in-hand with strategies that improve health and education, reduce inequality, and spur economic growth – all while preserving the environmental health of the plant (United Nations, 2015). A central idea of the 2030 Agenda is inclusiveness, from programme design, to monitoring and evaluation, to the socio-economic and political outcomes of development processes. The Agenda specifically identifies migrants, accounting for between three and four per cent of the global population according to 2020 UNDESA estimates, among those who are in vulnerable situations and often neglected by development processes (IOM, 2021c). Every year, the UN Secretary General presents an annual SDG progress report based on the global indicator framework and data produced by national statistical systems (NSS) and information collected at the regional level (United Nations, 2015).

SDG target 10.7, the target most explicitly related to international migration, calls on countries to facilitate orderly, safe, regular and responsible migration and mobility of people through the implementation of planned and well-managed migration politics. SDG indicator 10.7.2, “number of countries with policies to facilitate orderly, safe, regular and responsible migration and mobility of people” was developed by the co-custodians United Nations Department of Economic and Social Affairs (UN DESA) and IOM to track progress on SDG target 10.7. However, this indicator provides information on the extent to which migration governance mechanisms are in place as opposed to providing information on the characteristics of migration itself.

Data on SDG indicator 10.7.2 are collected by the Inter-Agency and Expert Group on SDG Indicators through an Inquiry which takes place every four years. The Inquiry includes a Module on International Migration containing questions about government policies, programs and strategies that are needed for global monitoring of indicator 10.7.2. (United Nations Population Division, 2020). The Module includes 30 different items clustered into 6 different policy domains. The Twelfth Inquiry was conducted between September 2018 and October 2019 and the Thirteenth Inquiry was conducted between November 2020 and October 2021. In total, 138 of the 197 countries participating in the Inquiry provided data on SDG indicator 10.7.2. One out of ten governments reported meeting the criteria for 10.7.2. while one out of three reported partially meeting the criteria. The findings reveal that many countries lag behind on policies for protecting migrants’ rights and promoting socioeconomic wellbeing or facilitating and promoting the flow of remittances, formal mechanisms for ensuring that migration policies are gender-responsive and measures for responding to the mobility dimensions of crises (UNDESA, 2021). The country-level and regional-level data on indicator 10.7.2 are available on the UNDESA Population Division website. Other indicator frameworks, including the Migration Governance Indicators, can be found in this paper prepared by the UN Migration Network (UNNM, 2023).

SDG indicator 10.7.3, or “the number of people who died or disappeared in the process of migration towards an international destination”, is another key indicator. At the global level, data for this indicator are currently based on IOM’s Missing Migrants Project (MMP), which records numbers of people who have died or are presumed to have died during international migration based on available data sources (https://missingmigrants.iom.int/data). These data provide a better understanding of the risks associated with unsafe or irregular migration, although they most likely underestimate the occurrence of such incidents as they depend on geographic coverage, media attention and politicization (IOM, 2021c). At the country level, the responsibility for responding to indicator 10.7.3. remains with states. Some countries have made considerable progress towards identifying missing migrants, for example, in 2013 several civil society organisations from Mexico, Honduras, El Salvador and Guatemala established a Forensic Commission mandated to exhume and identify remains from burial sites related to massacres of migrants and in 2015 the Mexican government established specialised institutions to investigate the disappearance of migrants (Citroni, 2017).

The SDG motto for the 2030 Agenda of ‘leave no one behind’ implies that sustainable development cannot be inclusive if it does not include migrants and, consequently, that countries should track the progress of the SDGs for migrant groups by collecting data that are disaggregated by migratory status. SDG Target 17.18 calls to increase the availability of “high-quality, timely and reliable data disaggregated by income, gender, age, race, ethnicity [and] migratory status”. This reflects a growing understanding that disaggregation of data is an important way to ensure inclusiveness for specific population subgroups (IOM, 2021c).

Disaggregation by migratory status is important for several reasons. First because it provides information on migration across various sectors, including health, education and employment which can be used to address inequalities between migrants and non-migrants. Disaggregation can shed light on situations where migrants are agents of development, for example by showing whether educational or occupational outcomes are different for children with emigrant parents. “Migrants are key actors in sustainable development. Around the world, they make vital contributions to help progress the SDGs, whether these focus on offering high-quality health care, boosting household income or increasing productivity in destination economies. Understanding the many positive links between migration and the SDGs is necessary to create migration governance that boosts development” (IOM, 2021c). Collecting data on migrants can also shed light on the extent to which sudden increases in displacement put pressure on host communities. Not collecting data on migrants may slow progress on the SDGs, especially in contexts where migrants make up a larger share of the total population. However, it is worth noting that disaggregating by migratory status can also improve the situation of citizens or immobile populations, for example in emergency situations where the assistance provided to forcibly displaced persons could be extended to the host population. Data disaggregation encourages states to fulfil their duties and obligations under international human rights law of realising and protecting the human rights of all, including migrants. Finally, targeting migrants in data collection enables policymakers to distribute resources in more efficient and effective ways, especially when one considers that investing in left-behind groups tends to yield bigger returns.

The Global Compact for Migration

In December 2018, a meeting of Heads of States, Governments and High Representatives adopted the Global Compact for Migration (United Nations General Assembly, 2019). The first of the 23 objectives of the Global Compact for Migration focuses on the need to “collect and utilize accurate and disaggregated data as a basis for evidence-based policies” (United Nations General Assembly, 2019:6).  It is important to note that disaggregated data can refer to the breaking down of information on the general population by migratory status or to the breaking down of information on migrants by a series of relevant socio-economic, demographic, or even attitudinal and behavioural characteristics. To fulfil the aforementioned objective, member states aim to draw from the following actions or best practices:

• developing a strategy for harmonising methodologies for data collection and strengthening the analysis and dissemination of migration-related data and indicators at the local, national, regional and global levels;
• improving the comparability of international migration statistics by further developing and applying the statistical definition of an international migrant;
• developing a global programme to build and enhance national capacities in data collection, analysis and dissemination;
• collecting, analysing and using data on the effects and benefits of
• migration as well as the contributions of migrants and diasporas to sustainable development;
• encouraging inter-agency collaboration on migration data and encouraging the integration of existing global and regional databases;
• establishing and strengthening regional centres for research and training on migration or migration observatories, such as the African Observatory for Migration and Development, to collect and analyse data in line with United Nations standards;
• improving national data collection by integrating migration-related topics into national censuses;
• conducting household, labour force and other surveys to collect information on the social and economic integration of migrants or add standard migration modules to existing household surveys;
• enhancing collaboration between government agencies responsible for migration data and national statistical offices to produce migration-related statistics;
• developing and using country-specific migration profiles, which include disaggregated data on all migration-relevant aspects in a national context;
• cooperating with relevant stakeholders in countries of origin, transit and destination to develop research, studies and surveys on migration.

Good quality statistics on forced displacement as a migration sub-type are a requirement for monitoring and implementing a number of international agendas and agreements including, but not limited to, the 2030 SDGs and their commitment to ‘leaving no one behind’ including refugees and IDPs; the 2015-2030 Sendai Framework for Disaster Risk Reduction; the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change Paris Agreement; and the Nansen Initiative’s protection agenda for people displaced across borders by disasters. The United Nations Statistical Commission (UNSC), at its 47th session in 2016, established the Expert Group on Refugee, IDP and Statelessness Statistics (EGRISS) with the initial mandate to develop International Recommendations on Refugee Statistics (EGRISS, 2018). EGRISS’ mandate was later extended to develop the International Recommendations on Internally Displaced Persons Statistics (EGRISS, 2021). The Global Compact on Refugees also makes recommendations on data calling for: the production and dissemination of reliable, comparable and timely data; the application of relevant data protection and data privacy principles; the harmonization of international standards for the collection, analysis and sharing of age, gender, disability and diversity disaggregated data; and the strengthening of NSS (United Nations, 2018). Furthermore, the recent inclusion of forced displacement in the SDG indicator framework (10.7.4: "the number of refugees by country of origin as a proportion of the national population of that country”) requires including refugees, IDPs and stateless persons in NSSs (UNHCR, 2020). 

 Figure 1: MGI, a key tool for GCM implementation