Initiatives

BD4M latest report, "Building a Policy Compass: Navigating Future Migration with Anticipatory Methods," from the Big Data for Migration Alliance (BD4M), explores how anticipatory methods can be used in migration policy. In a rapidly changing world, anticipating migration trends...

Mapping the most pressing, high-impact migrationquestions that could be answered if relevant datasets were leveraged in a responsible manner.

The Portal aims to serve as a unique access point to timely, comprehensive migration statistics and reliable information about migration data globally. The site is designed to help policy makers, nati

The Dynamic Data Hub gives direct access to single datasets to visualise migration and demography data and trends.

Over the past few years, migration has risen as one of the most challenging issues confronting policymakers around the world. This has been particularly true for countries in the Global South grappling with displacement caused by natural disasters, violence and human rights...

Abstract: "Venezuela is going through the worst economical, political and social crisis in its modern history. Basic products like food or medicine are scarce and hyperinflation is combined with economic depression. This situation is creating an unprecedented refugee and migrant...

This work presents a mobility indicator derived from fully anonymised and aggregated mobile positioning data. Even though the indicator does not provide information about the behaviour of individuals, it captures valuable insights into the mobility patterns of the population in...

Adequate data is key for evidence-informed policymaking. This report describes the initiative coordinated by the KCMD that has brought together relevant EU policy officers (from Commission DGs and services, and EU Agencies) to discuss the current state of migration data for EU...

This work introduces the concept of data-driven Mobility Functional Areas (MFAs) as geographic zones with high degree of intra-mobility exchanges. Such information, calculated at European regional scale thanks to mobile data, can be useful to inform targeted reescalation policy...

Human mobility across national borders is a key phenomenon of our time. At the global scale, however, we still know relatively little about the structure and nature of such transnational movements. This study uses a large dataset on monthly air passenger traffic between 239...

In November 2017, the European Commission’s Knowledge Centre on Migration and Demography (KCMD) and IOM’s Global Migration Data Analysis Centre (GMDAC) co-organized the expert workshop Big Data and alternative data sources on migration: from case-studies to policy support in...

To make sense of the disparate issues related to a domain such as migration, The GovLab’s 100 Questions methodology (detailed in full in Addendum I) begins with a topic mapping. This exercise, itself a product of The GovLab’s R-Search methodology, relies on desk research...

Quantifying global international mobility patterns can improve migration governance. Despite decades of calls by the international community to improve international migration statistics, the availability of timely and disaggregated data about long-term and short-term migration...

What is the potential of new data sources, such as mobile phones, social media and satellite imagery, to improve understanding of international migration and human mobility? How could data from these sources complement data from traditional sources, such as national population...

Big Data" is generated every time we send a text message, make a mobile phone call, run an Internet search, transfer money online or interact on social media. This article looks at the potential of using such data to improve data on migration at a time when there are growing...

IOM has developed a comprehensive strategy – the Migration Data Strategy – to frame, focus and further amplify its existing robust engagement on the issue of data. A key IOM goal is to improve the evidence base for good migration governance in support of sustainable development,...

Countries in Europe took different mobility containment measures to curb the spread of COVID-19. The European Commission asked mobile network operators to share on a voluntarily basis anonymised and aggregate mobile data to improve the quality of modelling and forecasting for the...

Due to the coronavirus global crisis, most countries have put in place restrictive measures in order to confine the pandemia and contain the number of casualties. Among the restrictive measures, air traffic suspension is certainly quite effective in reducing the mobility on the...

The first BD4M Studio convened over 40 stakeholders in government, international organizations, research, civil society, and the public sector to develop concrete strategies for initiating and implementing cross- sectoral data partnerships, or “data collaboratives,” to facilitate...