The Emergency Handbook provides guidance on when and how to engage in a contingency planning exercise for refugee emergencies. The guidance states that registration and documentation, as well as the identification of specific needs, should be considered in the response strategy of the contingency plan. A contingency plan for registration will not be as detailed and complete as an emergency registration strategy. It should, however, contain sufficient information to be easily converted into a skeleton emergency registration response. As such, it should include the foreseen role of the Government, of UNHCR and other partners, the objectives and admissibility criteria for registration, the initial types of registration foreseen (pre-registration and/or Individual Emergency Registration (IER)), possible registration locations, possible tools to be used, and an estimation of staffing and budgetary requirements for the first three months of the response.

At the outset of an emergency response, the Identity Management and Registration Officer must assess all the available information necessary in order to plan and develop a strategy for initiating registration activities as soon as possible. No two emergencies are the same and it is critical to understand the key elements of the specific emergency context to design an effective and appropriate response. Refer to Module 3.1 for guidance on understanding the operational context, including:

Border monitoring, as well as government sources and other estimations, are sources of important initial information on arrival rates, patterns of arrival and destination, sex/age breakdown and other relevant characteristics of the population concerned.

1 A fighter is any man, woman or child who is either a member of State armed forces (other than medical personnel and religious personnel) or the fighting forces of a non-State armed group.