The International Organization for Migration (IOM)’s Missing Migrants Project records incidents in which migrants, including refugees and asylum-seekers, have died at state borders or in the process of migrating to an international destination. It was developed in response to disparate reports of people dying or disappearing along migratory routes around the world, and particularly in the wake of two shipwrecks in October 2013, when at least 368 people died near the Italian island of Lampedusa. The Project hosts the only existing open-access database of records of deaths during migration on the global level. These data are used to inform the Sustainable Development Goals Indicator 10.7.3 on the “[n]umber of people who died or disappeared in the process of migration towards an international destination.” Missing Migrants Project is also a concerted effort towards informing the Global Compact on Migration’s Objective 8, which commits signatory states to “save lives and establish coordinated international efforts on missing migrants.” [1]
More than 44,000 migrants around the world have lost their lives since the project began in 2014. More than half of these deaths were recorded in the Mediterranean Sea, which has seen a devastating spike in deaths in recent years. The Missing Migrants Project collaborates with various government and non-government entities to collect data, and also draws on media and other available sources of information.
The outcomes of the Missing Migrant Project include: