electricsheepafrica/africa-unhcr-population-data-for-zaf

South Africa - Data on forcibly displaced populations and stateless persons

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

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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: ZAF.

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

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Dataset Characteristics

Domain	Demographics and population
Unit of observation	First-level administrative unit observations
Rows (total)	823
Columns	14 (8 numeric, 6 categorical, 0 datetime)
Train split	658 rows
Test split	164 rows
Geographic scope	ZAF
Publisher	UNHCR - The UN Refugee Agency
HDX last updated	2026-02-25

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Variables

Geographic — year (range 1966.0–2025.0), country_of_origin_code (ZAF), country_of_asylum_code (ZMB, GBR, USA), country_of_origin_name (South Africa), country_of_asylum_name (Zambia, United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland, United States of America) and 4 others.

Identifier / Metadata — refugees (range 0.0–11660.0), 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 0.0–7.0).

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Quick Start

from datasets import load_dataset

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

print(train.shape)
train.head()

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Schema

Column	Type	Null %	Range / Sample Values
year	int64	0.0%	1966.0 – 2025.0 (mean 2005.1458)
country_of_origin_code	object	0.0%	ZAF
country_of_asylum_code	object	0.0%	ZMB, GBR, USA
country_of_origin_name	object	0.0%	South Africa
country_of_asylum_name	object	0.0%	Zambia, United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland, United States of America
refugees	int64	0.0%	0.0 – 11660.0 (mean 453.7339)
asylum_seekers	int64	0.0%	0.0 – 2043.0 (mean 44.1495)
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 – 0.0 (mean 0.0)
stateless_persons	int64	0.0%	0.0 – 0.0 (mean 0.0)
others_of_concern_to_unhcr	int64	0.0%	0.0 – 7.0 (mean 0.0778)
host_community	int64	0.0%	0.0 – 0.0 (mean 0.0)
esa_source	object	0.0%	HDX
esa_processed	object	0.0%	2026-04-04

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Numeric Summary

Column	Min	Max	Mean	Median
year	1966.0	2025.0	2005.1458	2008.0
refugees	0.0	11660.0	453.7339	13.0
asylum_seekers	0.0	2043.0	44.1495	0.0
other_people_in_need_of_international_protection	0.0	0.0	0.0	0.0
internally_displaced_persons	0.0	0.0	0.0	0.0
stateless_persons	0.0	0.0	0.0	0.0
others_of_concern_to_unhcr	0.0	7.0	0.0778	0.0
host_community	0.0	0.0	0.0	0.0

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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.

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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.

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Citation

@dataset{hdx_africa_unhcr_population_data_for_zaf,
  title     = {South Africa - 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-zaf},
  note      = {Repackaged for machine learning by Electric Sheep Africa (https://huggingface.co/electricsheepafrica)}
}

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