United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR)

Name: United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR)
Creator: United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees
License: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/

Open · redistributedCreative Commons Attribution 4.0 (CC BY 4.0)Migration & Refugees

Redistributable. This source is served as canonical Parquet under the license below, with attribution and provenance preserved.

Coverage

Series catalogued

18,670

Temporal coverage

1951-12-31 – 2025-12-31

Licensing & provenance

License: Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 (CC BY 4.0)
License URL: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/
Required attribution: UNHCR Refugee Population Statistics Database
Redistribution: Permitted (served here)
Commercial use: Yes
Modification: Permitted
Provider homepage: https://www.unhcr.org/refugee-statistics
Provider terms: https://www.unhcr.org/what-we-do/data-and-publications/data-and-statistics/terms-use-datasets

How to cite

United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR). Retrieved from https://www.unhcr.org/refugee-statistics. Compiled and redistributed by the Elkassabgi Data Library.

Processing: Retrieved from the official source, normalized to a long {series_key, obs_date, value} schema (period-start dates), de-duplicated, and stored as zstd Parquet. Compiled and redistributed by the Elkassabgi Data Library.

Access & mirrors

Download: Select & download unhcr series as CSV →
API: Get a free API key, then GET /v1/series/<id>.csv
Canonical landing: https://econdatalibrary.com/unhcr
Update cadence: annual
Automated refresh: live — this database is on the daily update run
Update strategy: extend by date
Storage layout: single parquet: data/clean_full/unhcr/unhcr.parquet (~0.8 MB). Schema: series_key (string), obs_date date32 (Dec 31), value float64. Keys: {endpoint}:{field}:{coo_iso}:{coa_iso} (e.g. population:refugees:SYR:DEU). Zero/empty values dropped.

Full description

UNHCR Refugee Population Statistics. License: CC BY 4.0 (UN Refugee Agency open data) Source: https://api.unhcr.org/population/v1/ No API key required. Coverage: * Refugees, asylum seekers, IDPs, stateless persons, returned refugees * Bilateral (country-of-origin × country-of-asylum) flows * 1951–present, updated annually Strategy: * Iterate over all available years * For each year: paginate through population/idmc/solutions endpoints * Long format: series_key = {indicator}:{coo_iso}:{coa_iso} Run: python jobs/ingest_unhcr.py

Structured metadata

schema.org/Dataset (Google Dataset Search)

{
  "@context": "https://schema.org/",
  "@type": "Dataset",
  "name": "United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR)",
  "description": "Forced displacement — refugees, asylum-seekers and returnees by country (UNHCR). 18,670 series, 1951–2025. Free download under CC BY 4.0.",
  "url": "https://econdatalibrary.com/unhcr",
  "identifier": "unhcr",
  "isAccessibleForFree": true,
  "publisher": {
    "@type": "Organization",
    "name": "Econ Data Library",
    "url": "https://econdatalibrary.com"
  },
  "includedInDataCatalog": {
    "@type": "DataCatalog",
    "@id": "https://econdatalibrary.com/#catalog",
    "name": "Econ Data Library",
    "url": "https://econdatalibrary.com/catalog"
  },
  "creator": {
    "@type": "Organization",
    "name": "United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees",
    "alternateName": "UNHCR",
    "url": "https://www.unhcr.org/refugee-statistics"
  },
  "license": "https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/",
  "keywords": [
    "Migration & Refugees",
    "unhcr"
  ],
  "temporalCoverage": "1951-12-31/2025-12-31",
  "creditText": "UNHCR Refugee Population Statistics Database",
  "citation": "United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR). Retrieved from https://www.unhcr.org/refugee-statistics. Compiled and redistributed by the Elkassabgi Data Library.",
  "sameAs": [
    "https://huggingface.co/datasets/econdatalibrary-unhcr",
    "https://zenodo.org/communities/econdatalibrary"
  ],
  "distribution": [
    {
      "@type": "DataDownload",
      "name": "unhcr — CSV",
      "encodingFormat": "text/csv",
      "contentUrl": "https://econdatalibrary.com/download.html?source=unhcr",
      "license": "https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/"
    }
  ]
}

Croissant (ML-ready, schema.org JSON-LD)

{
  "@context": {
    "@language": "en",
    "@vocab": "https://schema.org/",
    "cr": "http://mlcommons.org/croissant/",
    "data": {
      "@id": "cr:data",
      "@type": "@json"
    },
    "dataType": {
      "@id": "cr:dataType",
      "@type": "@vocab"
    },
    "sc": "https://schema.org/",
    "conformsTo": "dct:conformsTo",
    "dct": "http://purl.org/dc/terms/"
  },
  "@type": "sc:Dataset",
  "conformsTo": "http://mlcommons.org/croissant/1.0",
  "name": "unhcr",
  "description": "Forced displacement — refugees, asylum-seekers and returnees by country (UNHCR). 18,670 series, 1951–2025. Free download under CC BY 4.0.",
  "url": "https://econdatalibrary.com/unhcr",
  "creator": {
    "@type": "sc:Organization",
    "name": "United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees",
    "alternateName": "UNHCR",
    "url": "https://www.unhcr.org/refugee-statistics"
  },
  "publisher": {
    "@type": "sc:Organization",
    "name": "Econ Data Library",
    "url": "https://econdatalibrary.com"
  },
  "license": "https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/",
  "keywords": [
    "Migration & Refugees"
  ],
  "temporalCoverage": "1951-12-31/2025-12-31",
  "citation": "United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR). Retrieved from https://www.unhcr.org/refugee-statistics. Compiled and redistributed by the Elkassabgi Data Library.",
  "distribution": [
    {
      "@type": "cr:FileObject",
      "@id": "unhcr-csv",
      "name": "unhcr-csv",
      "description": "Per-series CSV, downloadable with a free API key.",
      "contentUrl": "https://econdatalibrary.com/download.html?source=unhcr",
      "encodingFormat": "text/csv"
    }
  ]
}

Part of the Econ Data Library catalog · metadata generated 2026-08-02 from the central registry · browse all datasets