Gridding Forced Displacement using Semi-Supervised Learning

We present a semi-supervised approach that dis-aggregates refugee statistics from administrative boundaries to 0.5-degree grid cells across 25 Sub-Saharan African countries. By integrating UN-HCR's ProGres registration data with satellite-derived building footprints from Google Open Buildings and location coordinates from Open-StreetMap Populated Places, our label spreading algorithm creates spatially explicit refugee statistics at high granularity. This methodology achieves 92.9% average accuracy in placing over 10 million refugee observations into appropriate grid cells, enabling the identification of localized displacement patterns previously obscured in broader regional and national statistics. The resulting high-resolution dataset provides a foundation for a deeper understanding of displacement drivers.