‘Uprooted’: 1 in 200 children in the world is a refugee

There are 50 million “uprooted” children in the world. This is the main idea a new study by UNICEF has made public this week: "Uprooted: The Gorwing Crisis for Refugee and Migrant Children".

These are some of the main findings:

- 31 million children live outside their country of birth, including 11 million child refugees and asylum-seekers.

- In 2015, just two countries – Syria and Afghanistan – accounted for nearly half of all child refugees under UNHCR’s mandate; about three-quarters of all child refugees under UNHCR’s mandate came from only 10 countries.

- Girls and boys are equally represented among registered refugees, although children’s risk of specific protection violations – such as recruitment by armed forces and armed groups, or sexual and gender-based violence – may differ between girls and boys.

- Overall, the refugee population is much younger than the migrant population. While a clear majority of the world’s migrants are adults, children now comprise half of all refugees.

- Turkey hosts by far the largest total number of refugees under UNHCR’s mandate.

- By the end of 2015, some 41 million people were displaced by violence and conflict within their own countries; an estimated 17 million of them were children.

- At the end of 2015, 19.2 million people had been internally displaced by violence and conflict across Asia, a staggering 47 per cent of the global total for similar internal displacements.

- There were 12.4 million people internally displaced by violence and conflict across Africa in 2015. Four countries in Africa – Nigeria, Democratic Republic of the Congo, Central African Republic and South Sudan – were among the top 10 countries globally for new, violence-induced internal displacements in 2015.

- Globally, 3 out of every 5 international child migrants live in Asia or Africa.

Read the full “Uprooted” report published by UNICEF (September 2016).