Tracking Venezuelan Migrant Populations Through Facebook

iMMAP tracks the movement of Venezuelan refugees and migrants around Latin America on a biweekly basis by analyzing Facebook's Marketing API, based on the monthly behavior of users


iMMAP Dashboard



In order to meet the needs of refugee and migrant populations fleeing Venezuela, it is essential to identify the chosen routes and the temporary or permanent settlements of these communities. Surveys are usually the most common tool for measuring migratory movements. Still, in most cases, this information lacks current accuracy and does not allow to identify a specific person's movement over time.

To address this shortfall, iMMAP tracks the movement of Venezuelan refugees and migrants around Latin America on a biweekly basis by analyzing Facebook's Marketing API, based on the monthly behavior of users. The data are estimates of the potential reach of a Facebook ad based on the segmentation of the audience on its platform.

For the period between January 2019 and January 2020, we can observe a significant increase in the movement of the population migrating from Venezuela to the department of Valle del Cauca. This could be due to a more significant migration movement towards Cali or a high presence of floating population in transit to or from Ecuador and Peru. In the absence of a methodological note from Facebook, further in-depth analysis will be conducted to validate these findings.

Download our report on tracing individuals from Venezuela in Colombia through Facebook to learn more about the behavior of this migratory flow data.