Estimating Poverty Among Refugee Populations: A Cross-Survey Imputation Exercise for Chad

Estimating poverty for refugees in data-scarce contexts: an application of cross-survey imputation

“…Since the proGres data are administrative data and are updated for all these countries on a continuous basis, our proposed imputation method may be applied in all the listed countries to fairly recent data. In fact, a first experiment in that direction has been implemented for Chad with rather encouraging results (Beltramo et al 2021).…”

Measuring Poverty in Forced Displacement Contexts

“…The estimated coefficients from the model are then used to predict consumption for FDPs using census data (usually FDPs registration data) that lack consumption but include the same household characteristics used with the baseline survey model. This method has been tested with refugees in Jordan and Chad Verme, 2021, Beltramo et al, 2021) providing encouraging preliminary results. These works showed that accurate poverty estimations for refugees can be obtained with a relatively small number of proxies of well-being which are usually already available in the UNHCR proGres registration system.…”

“…This study led the World Bank to reconsider its role in working with refugee populations and encouraged this organization to strengthen cooperation with the UNHCR, leading to the establishment of a joint research program ("Building the Evidence on Forced Displacement"), country-level cooperation on data collection in several countries, a first round of analytical studies on refugees' well-being (Pape et al, 2018, Pape et al, 2019a, Cuevas et al, 2019, Beltramo et al, 2021, the establishment of a Joint Data Centre between the two organizations, and the implementation of joint rapid poverty assessments for FDPs in the course of the COVID-19 pandemic (see World Bank, 2021 for example). This collaboration was instrumental in equipping the World Bank with improved knowledge on refugee populations and the UNHCR with improved knowledge on data collection and poverty measurement among FDPs.…”

“…In the area of targeting based on means-tests, for example, a study has shown that Receiving Operations Characteristics (ROC) curves can be an effective decision making tool for humanitarian assistance programs (Verme and Gigliarano, 2019) while another study found that poverty differences in prediction methods for targeting purposes among refugees are attributable to few data fields suggesting that refugee homogeneity can make poverty predictions and targeting easier as compared to regular populations (Altindag et Al., 2021, Beltramo et al, 2019. The existence of the UNHCR refugee registration system, which can be regarded as a live census of refugees, has encouraged others to use cross-survey imputation techniques to estimate poverty among refugees even in the absence of income or consumption data Verme, 2021, Beltramo et al, 2021). The mobile nature of refugees and IDPs also lends itself to experimenting with new methodologies to measure poverty with alternative methods such as mobile phones (Blumenstock et al, 2015;Pape et al 2020, Wieser et al, 2021, or satellite imagery and remote sensing data (Abelson et al, 2014;Neal et al, 2016).…”