Assessing the impact of displacement on IDPs and host communities in Somalia
Published on 02 November 2022
Somalia, with nearly three million internally displaced people (IDPs) at the end of 2021, is one of the countries most affected by internal displacement. Conflict and violence displaced many people, but so did disasters, including drought and floods. Nearly a million new displacements were recorded as a result of floods alone in 2020.[1] Floods were the main driver of new displacements in 2020, but most of the research has focused on displacement linked with conflict, violence and drought. As floods become more frequent and intense, this knowledge gap needs to be urgently addressed. There were 393,000 new displacements from floods in Beledweyne, a city in central Somalia’s Beledweyne District, in 2020. That was almost 40 per cent of total disaster displacement in the country.[2]
INTERNAL DISPLACEMENTS
This preliminary analysis starts to piece together the impact and potential policies to support IDPs beyond humanitarian support. It analyzes data collected by the Internal Displacement Monitoring Centre (IDMC) in March 2021 in Beledweyne from 333 individuals – 164 internally displaced individuals and 169 people from within the host communities. Women make up 56% of respondents in IDP households and 47% of respondents in hosts households. The sample size while relatively small, provides a starting point to understand progress in reaching different development outcomes based only on the households sampled. While effort was made for the sample to be representative, the representativeness does not capture the entire population of IDPs or hosts in each country.
Composition of survey respondents
Development Impact
References
[1] IDMC, Country profile: Somalia, November 2022.
[2] IDMC report (2021) – Impact of Displacement: Flood Displacement in Beledweyne, Somalia
