INTRODUCTION
IDMC published its first estimates of the economic impact of internal displacement in eight countries in February 2019, using secondary data analysis to measure the cost of meeting the needs of internally displaced people (IDPs) in terms of health, education, security, housing and livelihoods.
Country-specific data was mostly found in Humanitarian Response Plans (HRPs) and other reports, which meant the estimates were as accurate as possible for a given country, but limited the analysis to countries where such reports are available.
This paper proposes two methodological approaches to compiling estimates in countries for which there is no secondary data. Sub-Saharan Africa is the region where the highest number of HRPs are available and so made a good testing ground.
Estimates based on secondary data analysis of the economic impact of internal displacement associated with conflicts in 13 sub-Saharan countries are reported in table 1. They served as the basis to project results to sub-Saharan African countries where no secondary data is available, using linear regression and K-nearest neighbour methods.
Adding estimates based on secondary data analysis and those based on modelled projections for all sub-Saharan countries affected by internal displacement associated with conflict produces a figure for the total economic impact on the region in 2018 of $4 billion. This represents 0.4 per cent of GDP, a significant burden for an already struggling economy.
METHODOLOGY
This paper aims to estimate the economic impact of a year of displacement per IDP, hereafter simply “cost per IDP”, in the areas of health, livelihoods, education, security and housing, for countries not covered by an HRP.
The main hypothesis of the analysis is that a country’s socioeconomic situation is linked to the impacts of internal displacement in several ways, including:
– The country’s ability to assist and protect IDPs
– The country’s resilience to and ability to recover after crises
– Opportunities for IDPs in host areas, including income-generating activities and education
– The ability of host communities to accommodate IDPs and face subsequent challenges
The World Bank’s database contains around 1,500 indicators of socioeconomic development that could have been used as an input dataset for the analysis. Some, however, were not helpful to the analysis or were missing too many values
