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Internally Displaced People Figures
About two-thirds of the world's forcibly uprooted people are displaced within their own country. They are known as internally displaced people (IDP) and UNHCR has been playing an increasingly important role in recent years in assisting them. According to the latest figures released by the Geneva-based Internal Displacement Monitoring Centre (IDMC), there were 27.5 million IDPs around the world in 2010, up slightly from 2009. The global number of IDPs has steadily increased from a total of around 17 million in 1997.
At the end of 2010, the UN refugee agency was caring for around 14.7 million of these IDPs, more than the total number of refugees of concern to UNHCR. Like refugees, they were forcibly displaced by conflict, generalized violence and human rights violations. UNHCR helps IDPs as part of a wider intervention by the international community.
The 27.5 million internally displaced civilians recorded in the IDMC in its report for the situation in 2010 included more than 4 million newly displaced, up 900,000 from the previous year, and an equivalent number of returns.
Africa was the most affected continent with 11.1 million IDPs in 21 countries, while regions with an increase in the number of IDPs over the year included the Americas, Europe, the Middle East and South, Central and South-East Asia.
The IDMC said Colombia, Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC), Iraq, Somalia and Sudan all had more than a million people identified as internally displaced at the end of 2010. During the course of the year, 20 countries were affected by new internal displacement, with Colombia, DRC, Kyrgyzstan, Pakistan, Somalia and Sudan having at least 200,000 people newly displaced.
IDP figures for 2011 are due out later in the year, but this was a year of major displacement in several countries, including Libya, Côte d'Ivoire, Somalia and the Sudan.
