| Crisis context/scope of work | Missing migrants, refugees and asylum seekers worldwide |
| Geographical scope | Global |
| Project period | Jan – March 2021 |
| Donors/partners | International Organization for Migration (IOM) |
| Budget | USD 36,000 |
| Technologies used: | Django, Postgres, PostGIS, React, Mapbox, D3.js |
| Problem | DFS’ solution |
| The International Organization for Migration (IOM), a leading intergovernmental organization in the field of migration, launched the Missing Migrants Project (MMP) in 2014 to collect data on incidents in which migrants, refugees, and asylum-seekers have disappeared or died. The resulting database is the only existing open-access database tracking migration deaths on the global level. The IOM system relies on data sources such as official records, national authorities, IOM field missions, NGOs reports, surveys and interviews of migrants, social media, and media reports worldwide. However, MMP’s media monitoring tools were unable to identify and return relevant media reports and recognize multilingual information, resulting in severe limitations and inaccuracies in MMP’s data and information repository. | IOM turned to DFS to develop a custom-tailored media monitoring and search tool to improve the breadth of media monitoring and the relevance of results returned through a partnership with IDMC’s IDETECT. The platforms were built to analyze thousands of daily global news sources through natural language processing and automated data collection. Using IDETECT, DFS delivered an information extraction tool for IOM that provides source information, incident cause data, tracks the number of lives lost, location information across multiple languages. The platform is driven by natural language processing technology which supports Google Chrome integration through an extension that efficiently integrates with the MMP platform. IDETECT supports IOM’s existing data review systems. |