Over 5 million Venezuelan refugees and migrants live abroad, having fled violence, threats, and lack of essential supplies and services. Latin America and the Caribbean have maintained a largely open-border policy. However, with more than 5,000 daily arrivals, national capacities in host communities are overstretched. UNHCR has been coordinating a region-wide approach to cope with the scale of the influx. Joint analysis and reinforced inter-agency tools are essential to assess the humanitarian conditions of affected populations and establish ‘country profiles’ to scale up operational impact. This requires information on mixed movements and unmet needs to be captured, categorized into a commonly agreed analysis framework, and made available to humanitarian actors. UNHCR needs very specific data to develop tailored assessment strategies at the national and regional levels to ensure humanitarian needs are identified and covered.
In collaboration with a mixed movement coordination platform, DFS has supported the development and adoption of UNHCR’s situational analysis framework to cover all information needs, ensuring compatibility with other ongoing initiatives in the Americas region. DFS is focusing on identifying and extracting information on unmet humanitarian needs in the countries affected by the Venezuelan refugees and migrant crisis in DEEP. Working with its teams of Spanish, English, and Portuguese-speaking taggers throughout the project, DFS ensures global standards and taxonomies are applied while identifying key priorities and tracking sources of information. The result is an ability to create vital snapshots, including situation analysis, for each affected country, informing country plans, interagency processes such as HNO/HRP, and the Regional Refugee and Migrant Response Plans (RMRP). To strengthen local capacities and facilitate the takeover of the secondary data review in DEEP, DFS has organized remote training and developed online tutorials for national focal points, supporting the project’s sustainability.
