Refugee population by country or territory of origin
What you should know about this indicator
A refugee is defined as a person in need of international protection, being outside their country of origin, because of serious threats against which the authorities of their home country cannot or will not protect them.
Sources and processing
This data is based on the following sources
How we process data at Our World in Data
All data and visualizations on Our World in Data rely on data sourced from one or several original data providers. Preparing this original data involves several processing steps. Depending on the data, this can include standardizing country names and world region definitions, converting units, calculating derived indicators such as per capita measures, as well as adding or adapting metadata such as the name or the description given to an indicator.
At the link below you can find a detailed description of the structure of our data pipeline, including links to all the code used to prepare data across Our World in Data.
Notes on our processing step for this indicator
- The data collected by the UNHCR describes movement of refugees between individual regions. To calculate the total number of refugees in a region, we sum up the data from all origin countries. The same applies to calculating all refugees from one country of origin.
- To calculate the number of refugees per 1,000 people in a country, we divide the number of refugees by the total population of the country and multiply by 1,000. The population estimates come from a long-run dataset maintained by Our World in Data.
Reuse this work
- All data produced by third-party providers and made available by Our World in Data are subject to the license terms from the original providers. Our work would not be possible without the data providers we rely on, so we ask you to always cite them appropriately (see below). This is crucial to allow data providers to continue doing their work, enhancing, maintaining and updating valuable data.
- All data, visualizations, and code produced by Our World in Data are completely open access under the Creative Commons BY license. You have the permission to use, distribute, and reproduce these in any medium, provided the source and authors are credited.
Citations
How to cite this page
To cite this page overall, including any descriptions, FAQs or explanations of the data authored by Our World in Data, please use the following citation:
“Data Page: Refugee population by country or territory of origin”, part of the following publication: Fiona Spooner, Tuna Acisu, Hannah Ritchie, Esteban Ortiz-Ospina, Max Roser and Marcel Gerber (2022) - “Migration”. Data adapted from UNHCR. Retrieved from https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/refugee-population-by-country-or-territory-of-origin [online resource]
How to cite this data
In-line citationIf you have limited space (e.g. in data visualizations), you can use this abbreviated in-line citation:
UNHCR (2024) – with major processing by Our World in Data
Full citation
UNHCR (2024) – with major processing by Our World in Data. “Refugee population by country or territory of origin” [dataset]. UNHCR, “Refugee Population Statistics Database 2023” [original data]. Retrieved October 5, 2024 from https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/refugee-population-by-country-or-territory-of-origin