16 May 2014

There are 33.3 million internally displaced people (IDPs) in the world today, according to a report by the Internal Displacement Monitoring Centre (IDMC), part of the Norwegian Refugee Council (NRC). This figure signifies another record-breaking year and a 4.5 million increase from 2012. The vast majority – over 78% – of newly displaced people reside in just five countries: Syria, the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC), the Central African Republic (CAR), Nigeria, and Sudan. Alarmingly, 43% of newly displaced people in 2013 were from Syria alone. According to the IDMC, “with 9,500 people a day (approximately one family every 60 seconds) being displaced inside Syria, the country remains the largest and fastest evolving displacement crisis in the world.”

The rapidly growing numbers of IDPs worldwide evince the need to “overcome the perception of internal displacement as a solely humanitarian issue and [position] it as a matter for development agencies, private companies and others to address in order to move towards long-term solutions,” says the IDMC.


This article originally appeared in the ECRE Weekly Bulletin of 16 May 2014.
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