Seeing the future? The mixed migration foresight project

What drives migration?

The world today faces an unprecedented number of forcibly displaced people with more than 65 million people displaced internally or across borders. While the demand for responses and solutions increases, the international community is facing substantial difficulties effectively utilizing data to predict, understand and address the underlying causes of mixed migratory flows.

The lack of common, fact-based understanding of migration drivers - including the impact of development, aid and prosperity in a globalized world, means that governments and other actors lack a common basis for policy discussion and solution development. There is a need for an objective and fact-based forecasting platform that may provide support for decision making. 

The model

Through this jointly owned project Danish Refugee Council (DRC) and IBM, with support from the Danish Ministry of Foreign Affairs will leverage their distinct capacities, relative strengths and sector knowledge to attempt to develop and test a predictive model. Indepth surveys with those in mixed flows (and smugglers) in East Africa Region alone and over 11,000 globally.

The project will also collaborate with other entities working on predictive modelling, academic institutions and independent experts in this endeavor that is recognized to be an ambitious attempt in a complex and multi-variate context.

The collation, combination and analysis based on the inter-relatedness of datasets and the use of machine learning MM4Sight hopes to offer a new methodology and tool in the field of mixed migration analysis. The project is vested with the Mixed Migration Centre, a knowledge centre in DRC that was established in February 2018.