Guiding Assistance and Support Intervention for Refugees on Account of their Vulnerability

Vulnerability is defined differently in the humanitarian context, depending on the mandates of the humanitarian agencies, the intended impact and the definition of the population to be assisted. For instance, WFP measures food security though the Food Security Index (FSI), a composite indicator defined in the widely used Consolidated Approach for Reporting Indicators of Food Security. For the UNHCR – United Nation High Commission for Refugees – refugees’ vulnerability is defined in the frame of the protection risk analysis by looking at the concept of international protection, which put into context risk, threat, vulnerabilities, and capacities. This accounts for a case-specific condition related to household capacity, dependency level within the household and occurrence of specific needs, such as the occurrence of serious medical needs, disabilities or individuals with special constraints. In this context, an important challenge is to account for the combination and articulation of the various dimensions of vulnerability to define population segment with a similar profile and for which distinct theories of change can be built. Each population segment shall be then targeted with a combination of coordinated assistance and intervention types, coming from multiple agencies and varying from emergency support, unconditional assistance, training, livelihoods graduation or even micro-credit. Using household survey and administrative registry data, the goal of this work is to create a vulnerability scoring tool to support assistance. To this end, an extended Item Response Theory (IRT) approach is considered and applied, which allows us to take into account concurrently the muldimensionality of the vulnerability status and the need to cluster refugees into homogeneous groups on account of different vulnerability levels. The proposed approach supports prioritization needs as it assigns a score to each group of refugees, so that it is possible to highlight the most/least vulnerable groups of refugees and sketch several refugees’ profiles according to the various dimensions of vulnerability.