Microproduct data guidebeginner

IDMC Internal Displacement

Country-year internal displacement figures for building humanitarian comparison tools alongside refugee statistics.

Start the guide Open official source

At a glance

Difficulty
Beginner — comfortable for a first prototype
Size
Tiny · ≤0.05 GB
Formats
Excel, CSV
Access
Download
API key
Not required
Provider
Internal Displacement Monitoring Centre
Updates
Annual
Data terms
Creative Commons Attribution for Intergovernmental Organisations

From source to product signal

Test a product idea in four steps

IDMC's Global Internal Displacement Database publishes country-year stocks and new displacements from conflict and disasters. Start with the Excel download. Figures are expert-validated estimates, not household surveys, and they are not UNHCR refugee counts.

1

Check the setup

  • Python 3.10 or newer
  • A notebook environment such as Jupyter or Google Colab
  • An internet connection
2

Access the data

  1. 1.Open the IDMC displacement-data page and download the GIDD Excel file.
  2. 2.Load the conflict-and-disasters sheet.
  3. 3.Keep ISO3, year, conflict displacements, and disaster displacements.
Open official source
3

Run the Python example

Install the packages, then run the notebook cell.

python -m pip install pandas requests openpyxl

import pandas as pd
import requests
from io import BytesIO

response = requests.get(
    "https://www.internal-displacement.org/sites/default/files/2024-05/IDMC_Internal_Displacement_Conflict-Violence_Disasters.xlsx",
    timeout=60,
)
response.raise_for_status()
displacement = pd.read_excel(BytesIO(response.content), sheet_name=0)
print(displacement.head())
4

Test a useful signal

Compare conflict and disaster displacements

Test whether GIDD country-year rows can power a bounded humanitarian sketch.

  1. 01Keep country, year, and conflict versus disaster displacement columns.
  2. 02Rank one year by new displacements and list missing ISO3 codes.
  3. 03Explain that GIDD figures are curated estimates, not UNHCR refugee statistics, and can be revised.

Dataset details

Internal Displacement Monitoring Centre is a nonprofit source. Last verified 2026-08-18. Temporal coverage: 2008-present GIDD stocks and flows.

Theme

Demographics & Development

Domains

Forced DisplacementHumanitarian Development

Data types

TabularTime SeriesPopulation Data

Tasks

Displacement AnalysisCountry ComparisonHumanitarian Monitoring

Geography

Global

Formats

ExcelCSV

Provider

Internal Displacement Monitoring Centre

Data terms

Creative Commons Attribution for Intergovernmental Organisations