Iraq – Access To Durable Solutions Among IDPs In Iraq: Six Years In Displacement (2022)

What happens to households experiencing protracted displacement during a global pandemic? This is not a question that Access to Durable Solutions Among IDPs in Iraq, a panel study conducted by IOM and Georgetown University, initially anticipated answering at its inception six years ago.1 Yet this question is one the study is uniquely positioned to answer. The mixed-method project collects data from surveys and interviews to understand how the same Iraqi IDP households displaced by the conflict with the Islamic State in Iraq and the Levant (ISIL) try to access a “durable solution” to their displacement as defined by the Inter-Agency Standing Committee’s Framework on Durable Solutions. Conducted among the non-camp population of IDPs displaced between 2014 and 2015, the study operationalized the eight criteria that collectively measure a durable solution: safety and security, standard of living, livelihood, housing, access to documentation, family reunification, participation in public affairs, and access to justice. Using each of these criteria over six rounds of data collection, the study has tracked changes in what challenges IDP households face and the solutions they engineer as they search for a durable solution to their displacement. Based on findings from the newest, sixth round of data collection, this report details not only how COVID-19 affects IDPs, but specifically, and in keeping with the purpose of the study, how the COVID-19 pandemic affected IDP households’ abilities to achieve a durable solution. This latter endeavor entails two tasks: first, to identify what challenges persist because they existed pre-COVID-19 (and are thus primarily displacement-related), and second, to identify what challenges the COVID-19 pandemic has created or made worse. The longitudinal nature of the Access to Durable Solutions study and its ability to compare current findings with past trends using the same indicators facilitated disentangling and completing these two tasks