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Primary GCM Objectives

GCM Guiding Principles*

*All practices are to uphold the ten guiding principles of the GCM. This practice particularly exemplifies these listed principles.

Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs)

Dates

2016 - 2019

Type of practice

Project/Programme

Geographic scope

Summary

Within the “Monitoring Progress in Achieving the Migration Targets of the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development in Armenia” Project, funded by the IOM Development Fund, IOM has examined priorities of Armenia in the field of migration and development in the context of the SDGs. A comprehensive mapping exercise of Armenia’s migration data sources and processes has been undertaken and recommendations on the enhancement of data collection for migration-related SDG targets have been provided. IOM also proposed indicators for prioritized targets and developed a methodology for monitoring and measuring the progress of Armenia in the field of migration and development towards achieving the SDGs. In this regard, country priorities in Migration and Development, and related data sources were identified, access to migration data aligned with SDG-s targets enhanced for stakeholders in Armenia and beyond, and capacity of the Statistical Committee of Armenia (ArmStat) was enhanced to monitor and report progress on achieving SDG Targets thanks to improvements of the software for the National SDG Reporting Platform and enhanced and data processing capacity. An initial assessment was conducted which served as a basis to initiate a sustainable monitoring process on achieved progress in the area of migration and development, to introduce sustainable mechanism for regular data collection and reporting on migration and development within the context of the 2030 Agenda.

Organizations

Main Implementing Organization(s)

International Organization for Migration (IOM)

Detailed Information

International Organization for Migration (IOM)

Partner/Donor Organizations

Statistical Committee of the Republic of Armenia - ArmStat

Benefit and Impact

The results achieved in relation to the SDG targets prioritization, migration data collection and indicator development contributed to the development of one of the IOM flagship publications - "Migration and the 2030 Agenda: A Guide for Practitioners".
IOM’s experience on prioritization of migration aspects of SDGs in Armenia, elaborated methodology for the development of indicators and ways of linking migration to the development priorities of the country, was shared with government and non-government stakeholders beyond the region as well - in Tunisia by the request of Tunisian side with the aim of the further possible replication of Armenia’s experience for development of similar exercise in Tunisia.
One of the other key results of the Project was improving access to migration data in Armenia. To this end, Migration Snapshot for Armenia was developed. In line with preparation of the Migration Snapshot of Armenia, instructions for the Statistical Committee of Armenia (ArmStat) to produce the snapshot with new data in subsequent years were developed. The Migration Snapshot is placed as a separate publication on the ArmStat website, and, as a result, the access to migration data has been greatly improved for all the users. ArmStat continuously prepares and presents Migration Snapshot for wide rage of users and general public.
One of the other key benefits was development of the National SDG Reporting Platform for Armenia. The Reporting Platform was considered as good practice and efforts directed to improve the access to data, visualization, functionality as well as data structure, data security and data flow. The National SDG Reporting Platform is being pro-actively advocated by ArmStat at various venue, including at the UNECE Regional Forum for Sustainable Development and, as a result, the Armenian experience is now used by the national counterparts in Central Asia to create/improve their reporting platforms.
Development of the methodology for the monitoring of Migration and Development in the context of SDGs advanced prioritization of the migration data also in the policy making, e.g. information on migration was included into Voluntary National Reviews, which were prepared and submitted by the Republic of Armenia. Migration was proposed as one of the SDG accelerators by the 2017 Mainstreaming, Acceleration and Policy Support (MAPS) mission to Armenia as well.

Key Lessons

Political turbulence was one of the major challenges occurred during implementation of initiatives. In a meantime IOM’s main counterpart - ArmStat remained dedicated throughout addressing the problems in the data collection, monitoring and reporting on SDGs, which helped to overcome the emerged challenges.
As lessons learned it should be mentioned that the whole-of-government and whole-of-society approach are key in terms of SDG-s targets prioritization process. Duly prioritized targets and Government’s commitment are crucial for whole process.

Recommendations(if the practice is to be replicated)

In order to have sustainable results, they should be fully owned by the Government. In this regard, Government’s leadership during the whole process of prioritization of SDG-s targets in the context of migration and development should be encouraged and supported.

Innovation

The practice is considered to be innovative especially in terms of creating proxy indicators to measure migration-related SDG targets, which at the start of the project had not seemingly been done elsewhere. Moreover, the project had a number of good practices, mainly regarding the process of prioritization of SDG-s targets in the context of migration and development of Armenia, that could be replicated in other migration data capacity building initiatives elsewhere.

Additional Resources

Migration Data in the Context of the 2030 Agenda: Measuring migration and development in Armenia

Date submitted:

08 February 2022

Disclaimer: The content of this practice reflects the views of the implementers and does not necessarily reflect the views of the United Nations, the United Nations Network on Migration, and its members.