Project Overview & Methodology Overview and Key Research Objectives
of CDR. This report focuses on potential use cases for humanitarian organizations responding to displacement in humanitarian contexts. The cases include countries with other causes of mobility, such as climate change, but much of the analysis and conclusions are focused on the humanitarian context.
In recent years, IOM has significantly expanded its efforts to collect data to better understand global migration flows and identify priority need areas across humanitarian and displacement contexts. Since 2004, IOM’s Displacement Tracking Matrix (DTM) has collected and analyzed migration data in over 72 countries, implementing mobility tracking, flow monitoring, registration, and surveys.1 This data has been utilized to provide detailed information on the mobility, needs, and vulnerabilities of displaced persons to improve humanitarian assistance and guide the policies of IOM and other actors.
Methodology
Despite these expansions, data gathering with current methods remains costly, challenging, or in some cases impossible. CDR presents a potentially valuable addition to humanitarian agencies’ existing methods of monitoring displacement and mobility. In the event of humanitarian disasters, and especially in difficult operating environments, the ability to rapidly triangulate data sources to verify and enrich information is critical. However, triangulation is often impossible due to the lack of secondary and tertiary data points. Despite its potential benefits as an additional data source for triangulation, CDR also presents unique challenges and ethical concerns.
More specifically, this research examines CDR use across different types of humanitarian and mobility contexts:
Princeton SPIA graduate students conducted research from August to November 2020 on the use of CDR in humanitarian responses to internal and cross-border displacement. The main partner for this research is the United Nations’ Migration Agency, IOM.
This report provides humanitarian agencies and organizations like IOM with an overview of the opportunities, limitations, and risks of CDR use. It seeks to address the question: to what extent is CDR use ethically permissible and practically feasible in shaping humanitarian response in diverse displacement contexts? In accordance with the project’s scope, this research is intended to identify challenges and solutions in considering the use of CDR across different contexts, but this report does not make a recommendation about the adoption
The analysis evaluates potential CDR use in ten humanitarian and high mobility contexts: the Bahamas, Bangladesh, Dominica, Ecuador, El Salvador, Guatemala, Haiti, Honduras, Federated States of Micronesia (Micronesia), and the Philippines. It also draws upon the diverse perspectives of IOM country offices, government officials, other international organizations, civil society groups, MNOs, and displaced persons. Findings fall into three fundamental areas of consideration for CDR use: practical, regulatory, and ethical.
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Practical considerations: Under what conditions is CDR useful for tracking mobility, and does CDR capture representative data of the population of interest? Regulatory environment: What regulatory environment is conducive to a CDR program? Ethical considerations: What is required to ensure any CDR program adheres to ‘Do No Harm’ principles, and what are the key ethical risks of a potential CDR program?
The research team synthesized findings into four deliverables: a questionnaire, detailed case studies, a final report, and a presentation of the findings. The deliverables were informed by desk research, supplementary interviews with global experts and case country stakeholders, and expert review panels. This project built on existing research and literature on the prior use of CDR, displacement tracking, and
Assessing the Use of CDR for Monitoring Mobility and Displacement
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