Turkey: Baseline Assessment in İstanbul Province, Field Observation Report - May-July 2019
Introduction
ABOUT MIGRANTS’ PRESENCE MONITORING (MPM)
At present, Turkey hosts more than 4 million foreign nationals in its territory. The country’s central geopolitical location on the Eastern Mediterranean Sea Route, and its proximity to countries suffering internal crises (e.g., Iraq, Syrian Arab Republic, Afghanistan) has placed Turkey under sustained migratory pressure.
To gain valuable insight into their presence, flows, locations, intentions and vulnerabilities of refugees and migrants living in Turkey, the International Organization for Migration’s (IOM) Migrant Presence Monitoring Programme (MPM), part of the global Displacement Tracking Matrix (DTM), conducted an MPM Baseline Assessment. This Baseline tracks migrant presence in Turkey and creates a database that enables the Government of Turkey (GoT), humanitarian aid organizations and other migration-related stakeholders to understand and address the scale and complexity of the current migration flows to, through and within Turkey as well as the profile of refugees and foreign nationals present in the country.
In line with established methodology, the data collection for Baseline Assessment consists of two phases: Baseline 1 and Baseline 2. Baseline 1 is the initial phase of the Baseline, during which the MPM team gathers official data on migrant presence, at provincial and sub-provincial level, in coordination with the Directorate General of Migration Management (DGMM). Baseline 2 focuses on collecting data on migrant presence directly from the field. During this phase, the MPM team gathers data through Key Informant Interview (KII) methodology, where Key Informants include both mukhtars6 and other local authorities in mahalles (urban) and villages (rural).
Similarly, Baseline 2 data collection also focuses on migrant presence, but it does so at mahalle and village levels. The results of both phases are then compared to identify differences which the MPM team then analyses for further insights. For example, the Baseline provides valuable insight on tracking changes in migrant mobility and identifying migrant figured per category, including estimated numbers of irregular migrants.
IOM’s MPM Programme, including this Baseline, is coordinated jointly with the DGMM, the lead national agency charged with managing migration issues in Turkey. The methodology and operational implementation of the MPM Programme activities are based on IOM’s DTM model which seeks to improve the information management capacity and aims to ensure that information and data on migrant/ refugee presence are collected and corroborated in accordance with the applicable procedures.
