UNHCR’s registration activities are a major source of population data, which is essential for its own programming purposes and of universal relevance to the entire humanitarian community. This module provides guidance on how to effectively use and analyse registration data at the individual, group and population levels.

Registration data provides valuable information about the overall demographic and other characteristics of a certain population of concern, (e.g. population figures, levels, rates, averages and other patterns). When disaggregated,¹ it also facilitates the identification of individuals and groups for available programmes and interventions. As such, registration data is key for designing, planning, targeting, delivering, tracking and monitoring protection and assistance interventions across multiple sectors and activities, and should be analysed and drawn upon for these purposes on an ongoing basis.

In operations where data is updated by verification rather than continuous registration, registration data is best analysed following the verification exercise when the data has been refreshed.

1 The term “disaggregated” means that aggregated data is separated out, for example, to the individual level, so that personal data can be seen, or to the group level, so that data is divided into different demographic groups, such as age, sex or disability.