12-14 December 2022
The EGRISS organised its 2022 Meeting, ‘Delivering on our mandate and looking to the future’, hosted by the UN Economic Commission for Africa (UNECA) in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia. This event brought around 100 members of the Expert Group together to strengthen the group’s ability to achieve its current mandate and discuss the possible future of the group beyond 2024.
The meeting came at a critical moment as the world faces an unprecedented scale of forced displacement, with the number of people forced to flee due to persecution, war or violence is estimated to be over 100 million for the first time. When EGRISS was established in 2016 by the UN Statistical Commission, the numbers of refugees and IDPs worldwide were already high; since then many displacement situations have become protracted and new ones have emerged.
In mid-2022, the EGRISS reached halfway through its five-year mandate that takes it from 2022 to 2024. Following the completion of International Recommendations on Refugee and IDP Statistics (IRRS and IRIS), the EGRISS’ work now focuses on promoting and supporting their implementation. In 2021, the Group’s mandate was further expanded to develop a third set of recommendations on statelessness statistics (IROSS).
Since the last all EGRISS members meeting, significant progress has been made! Over a hundred examples of IRRS/IRIS implementation have been identified; EGRISS’ membership has grown to over 50 countries and 30 international and regional organizations; and four active technical subgroups are working together to improve statistical inclusion of refugees, IDPs and stateless persons in national systems. The 2022 meeting was an opportunity to take stock on this progress and look brightly into the future of improving the development of statistics on forced displacement at national, regional, and global levels.
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