According to the Ministry of Social Policy of Ukraine, in July 2020, there were 1,448,615 people registered as internally displaced persons (IDPs), that is individuals who have le their homes and moved to a different area and/or region of Ukraine. Almost half of the registered IDPs settled in government-controlled areas (GCA) of Donetsk Oblast (510,861) and Luhansk Oblast (280,520). Areas with the highest shares of IDPs located further away from the mentioned oblasts included the city of Kyiv (160,036) and Kyiv Oblast (63,267), Kharkiv Oblast (134,335), Dnipropetrovsk Oblast (71,277) and Zaporizhia Oblast (56,107). In 2016, IOM began conducting a regular complex survey of the situation with IDPs in Ukraine – the National Monitoring System (NMS) to support all the government and non-government stakeholders in designing evidence-based policies and programmatic responses on IDPs.
The NMS annually reaches more than 15,000 conflict-affected persons across all the 24 oblasts of Ukraine, including IDPs residing in government- controlled areas (GCA), those who have returned to the non-government controlled areas (NGCA) and other groups. The survey collects information on the different aspects of IDPs’ lives: financial situation, employment, needs, mobility, and integration into the local communities. The NMS methodology ensures data collection using both quantitative and qualitative research methods including face-to-face and telephone sample surveys, focus group discussions (FGDs) as well as other relevant data sources.
