Strengthening Migration Data for Decisioin Making: Innovations in Design and Collection

Abstract

Researchers and policy makers are fortunate that data on migration is rapidly improving in both quality and availability. In addition to improvements in measuring international migration with census data, more and more household surveys contain questions about migration experiences and remittance flows, allowing us to test ideas more robustly, draw deeper insights and challenge myths. But household surveys typically capture small numbers of households with migrants and are limited in the richness of data collected on the experience households have of migration.This briefing describes the approach used in Migrating out of Poverty to collect data on households and their migrants in five countries in the global South, highlighting some of the innovative features that we believe will appeal to other researchers, providing some insights from our data, and explaining how we hope to develop our surveys in the future.