Datasets:

electricsheepafrica
/

africa-unhcr-population-data-for-rwa

annotations_creators:
  - no-annotation
language_creators:
  - found
language:
  - en
license: cc-by-4.0
multilinguality:
  - monolingual
size_categories:
  - 1K<n<10K
source_datasets:
  - original
task_categories:
  - tabular-classification
  - tabular-regression
task_ids: []
tags:
  - africa
  - humanitarian
  - hdx
  - electric-sheep-africa
  - asylum-seekers
  - internally-displaced-persons-idp
  - population
  - refugees
  - stateless-persons
  - rwa
pretty_name: Rwanda - Data on forcibly displaced populations and stateless persons
dataset_info:
  splits:
    - name: train
      num_examples: 1736
    - name: test
      num_examples: 434

Rwanda - Data on forcibly displaced populations and stateless persons

Publisher: UNHCR - The UN Refugee Agency · Source: HDX · License: cc-by-igo · Updated: 2026-02-25

Abstract

Data collated by UNHCR, containing information about forcibly displaced populations and stateless persons, spanning across more than 70 years of statistical activities. The data includes the countries / territories of asylum and origin. Specific resources are available for end-year population totals, demographics, asylum applications, decisions, and solutions availed by refugees and IDPs (resettlement, naturalisation or returns).

Each row in this dataset represents first-level administrative unit observations. Data was last updated on HDX on 2026-02-25. Geographic scope: RWA.

Curated into ML-ready Parquet format by Electric Sheep Africa.

Dataset Characteristics


Domain	Demographics and population
Unit of observation	First-level administrative unit observations
Rows (total)	2,170
Columns	14 (8 numeric, 6 categorical, 0 datetime)
Train split	1,736 rows
Test split	434 rows
Geographic scope	RWA
Publisher	UNHCR - The UN Refugee Agency
HDX last updated	2026-02-25

Variables

Geographic — year (range 1961.0–2025.0), country_of_origin_code (RWA), country_of_asylum_code (BDI, UGA, COD), country_of_origin_name (Rwanda), country_of_asylum_name (Burundi, Uganda, Democratic Republic of the Congo) and 4 others.

Identifier / Metadata — refugees (range 0.0–1252837.0), esa_source (HDX), esa_processed (2026-04-04).

Other — other_people_in_need_of_international_protection (range 0.0–0.0), others_of_concern_to_unhcr (range 0.0–9277.0).

Quick Start

from datasets import load_dataset

ds    = load_dataset("electricsheepafrica/africa-unhcr-population-data-for-rwa")
train = ds["train"].to_pandas()
test  = ds["test"].to_pandas()

print(train.shape)
train.head()

Schema

Column	Type	Null %	Range / Sample Values
`year`	int64	0.0%	1961.0 – 2025.0 (mean 2007.6327)
`country_of_origin_code`	object	0.0%	RWA
`country_of_asylum_code`	object	0.0%	BDI, UGA, COD
`country_of_origin_name`	object	0.0%	Rwanda
`country_of_asylum_name`	object	0.0%	Burundi, Uganda, Democratic Republic of the Congo
`refugees`	int64	0.0%	0.0 – 1252837.0 (mean 7841.924)
`asylum_seekers`	int64	0.0%	0.0 – 21207.0 (mean 163.0493)
`other_people_in_need_of_international_protection`	int64	0.0%	0.0 – 0.0 (mean 0.0)
`internally_displaced_persons`	int64	0.0%	0.0 – 625000.0 (mean 436.3488)
`stateless_persons`	int64	0.0%	0.0 – 0.0 (mean 0.0)
`others_of_concern_to_unhcr`	int64	0.0%	0.0 – 9277.0 (mean 62.635)
`host_community`	int64	0.0%	0.0 – 12197.0 (mean 29.8488)
`esa_source`	object	0.0%	HDX
`esa_processed`	object	0.0%	2026-04-04

Numeric Summary

Column	Min	Max	Mean	Median
`year`	1961.0	2025.0	2007.6327	2009.0
`refugees`	0.0	1252837.0	7841.924	63.0
`asylum_seekers`	0.0	21207.0	163.0493	0.0
`other_people_in_need_of_international_protection`	0.0	0.0	0.0	0.0
`internally_displaced_persons`	0.0	625000.0	436.3488	0.0
`stateless_persons`	0.0	0.0	0.0	0.0
`others_of_concern_to_unhcr`	0.0	9277.0	62.635	0.0
`host_community`	0.0	12197.0	29.8488	0.0

Curation

Raw data was downloaded from HDX via the CKAN API and converted to Parquet. Column names were lowercased and standardised to snake_case. Common missing-value markers (N/A, null, none, -, unknown, no data, #N/A) were unified to NaN. The dataset was split 80/20 into train and test partitions using a fixed random seed (42) and saved as Snappy-compressed Parquet.

Limitations

Data originates from UNHCR - The UN Refugee Agency and has not been independently validated by ESA.
Automated cleaning cannot correct for misreported values, definitional inconsistencies, or sampling bias in the original collection.
Refer to the original HDX dataset page for the publisher's own methodology notes and caveats.

Citation

@dataset{hdx_africa_unhcr_population_data_for_rwa,
  title     = {Rwanda - Data on forcibly displaced populations and stateless persons},
  author    = {UNHCR - The UN Refugee Agency},
  year      = {2026},
  url       = {https://data.humdata.org/dataset/unhcr-population-data-for-rwa},
  note      = {Repackaged for machine learning by Electric Sheep Africa (https://huggingface.co/electricsheepafrica)}
}

Electric Sheep Africa — Africa's ML dataset infrastructure. Lagos, Nigeria.