Identify and Analyze Current Metrics Addressing Conflict-Affected Populations

The Women's Refugee Commission is a nonprofit organization that advocates for "laws, policies and programs to improve the lives and protect the rights of refugee and internally displaced women, children and young people." The SIPA Capstone team was invited to explore extant data collection and reporting on conflict-affected and displaced populations. The WRC believes that tracking a consistent set of indicators over time will allow the international donor and practitioner community to measure the effectiveness of humanitarian efforts and to allocate resources where they are most needed.

The SIPA team’s mandate was to inventory existing current data collection sources, identify the gaps, and recommend how to improve tracking of key life indicators of conflict-affected populations to inform the humanitarian system. The team explored four source categories: multilateral institutions, national governments, NGOs, and non-operational entities. In the report, the team identified the strengths and limitations of each source, as well as the extent to which each source captures the WRC’s select indicators, and specifically for conflict-affected populations. Recommendations address steps that the WRC can take to advocate across multiple stakeholders to improve measurement of progress in humanitarian settings.