Vienna – “If we want to understand the important questions of ‘why’, ‘where’ and ‘who’, we need information from people on the move,” said Daunia Pavone, a UN Migration Agency staffer currently stationed in Greece.

She was speaking at a global training event, which ended on Friday, at IOM’s Regional Office in Vienna, where dozens of staff from all over the world were being trained in the use of the Organization’s Displacement Tracking Matrix (DTM).

DTM is a system developed by IOM, which tracks and monitors displacement and population mobility so that governments and organizations can better understand the movements and needs of displaced people. It provides reliable data and information for crisis response planning.

DTM works by compiling data collected by professionals at key points of origin, transit and destination via interviews, surveys and official government statistics right where the displacement is happening, in real time. Raw data can then be further interpreted, utilized and shared by experts at regional and inter-regional levels at the DTM hubs in Dakar, Nairobi, Cairo, Vienna and Bangkok.

“This is our sixth global training session but it is the first time we’ve done one in Europe,” explained Stephanie Daviot, from IOM’s global DTM team, who headed up the introductory session. “We are expanding IOM’s capacity to synthesize and analyse data, allowing staff to learn from experts and each other as well as reinforcing DTM as the foremost system for tracking and monitoring displaced persons.”

To date, DTM has been used to track 15 million people on the move, employs 4,000 data officers and 200 experts and is active in 48 countries. This all works through on-site data collection and close work with local, regional and national authorities.

DTM cooperation with all levels of government is very well organized in current migration hotspots, notably Turkey. “The national authorities are very much in favour of this work, especially because no one else has this data at the moment,” said Gokan Yasar, DTM Project Assistant for IOM Turkey.

Data on the roughly 3.5 million migrants and refugees in Turkey is collected at a neighbourhood level and is shared with the Turkish Directorate for Migration Management. This agreement has allowed IOM to expand data collection from 15 to 25 of the 81 provinces in the country.

The DTM system has also played a key role along the Balkan route, used by people migrating deeper into Europe. It uses Geoportal, an interactive mapping feature that utilizes up-to-date on-site data to physically map the locations of migrants.

Geoportal allowed the locations of those on the move to be kept current even when their movement was stopped by the reintroduction of border controls. “Once the migration flows through the Western Balkans route dropped as an aftermath of the EU-Turkey Statement, with the established network we were able to assess and monitor the number of migrants who got stranded in the countries along the route,” explained
Kristina Uzelac, a DTM Officer based in the IOM Regional Office in Vienna.

Visit the Displacement Tracking Matrix websites here:
http://www.globaldtm.info/
http://migration.iom.int/europe/

For more information, please contact Ivona Zakoska-Todorovska at the IOM Regional Office in Vienna, Tel: +4315812222, Email: izakoska@iom.int