The 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development recognizes for the first time the contribution of migration to sustainable development. Migration is a cross-cutting issue, relevant to all of the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). 11 out of 17 goals contain targets and indicators that are relevant to migration or mobility. The Agenda's core principle to "leave no one behind", including migrants, requires data disaggregation by migratory status, opening up significant migration data needs but also the opportunity to improve migration data.
Measuring progress on the SDGs
The SDGs’ central reference to migration is made in target 10.7 to facilitate orderly, safe, regular and responsible migration and mobility of people, including through the implementation of planned and well-managed migration policies, which appears under Goal 10 to reduce inequality within and among countries.
As was the case for the Millennium Development Goals, the 2030 Agenda envisages a voluntary and multilayered follow-up mechanism to review progress on the SDG targets over the next 15 years. National reviews will be the linchpin of the follow-up and review of the implementation of the SDGs, with regional and global reviews being conducted to complement the process.
The need for timely, reliable and impactful data on migration
Therefore, it is essential to ensure that governments are able and empowered to track progress on their commitments. Timely, reliable, and impactful data on migration will help guide policy makers in devising evidence-based policies and plans of action to tackle migration aspects of the SDGs. Several countries do collect data on migration, but lack the mechanisms to centralize, disaggregate and cross reference all data collected from various branches of the government. Better data sharing within the government and among countries will improve policy coherence, which is a key condition to achieving the SDGs.
The starting point of data collection on the SDGs is the need for reliable and measurable indicators
IOM and the Population Division of UNDESA have been working on developing a methodology to measure the indicator 10.7.2 “the number of countries having well-managed migration policies”. This indicator is based on an assessment of six policy domains found in the Migration Governance Framework, adopted by the IOM Council in 2015. It is also inspired by the work IOM is conducting in collaboration with the Economist Intelligence Unit on developing Migration Governance Indicators.
The Migration Governance Indicators use 90 qualitative questions to measure performance across five domains, drawn from the Migration Governance Framework. It is a gap analysis tool that is not meant for ranking countries on their migration policies, but rather aims to offer insights on policy levers that countries can action to strengthen their migration governance, as well as identify best practices of future programming. The results of this assessment can also be used by government to report on their progress in achieving target 10.7 as well as other migration-related targets.
