World Bank-UNHCR Joint Data Center on Forced Displacement + Revisual Labs
Forced Displacement in East Africa
The Living Conditions of Forcibly Displaced People in Somalia, Ethiopia, South Sudan, and Uganda
Design
Introduction
Roughly 1 in 5 displaced people around the world belong to the East and Horn of Africa and Great Lakes region. UNHCR and the Joint Data Center sought to tell a story about the scale and causality of displacement in the region, alongside recommendations for policymakers to improve on-ground reality.
We at Revisual Labs designed and developed a five-chapter data story on forced displacement in Somalia, Ethiopia, South Sudan, and Uganda.
Design
Art direction for the story was informed by a visual inquiry into photographs of all four countries. Common elements and themes were abstracted into motifs, colours, and other visual assets used in the story. Yellow jerry cans—a means of water collection—were ubiquitous across all countries' photographs, leading us to elect it as the story's core colour.
Another observation was the vast expanses of land that FDPs were faced with traversing, which translated into spot illustrations surrounded by swathes of negative space.
Design
During a design workshop with the client, a stakeholder with work experience in the region mentioned that "Africa is tribal. They don't necessarily think in terms of boundaries. The way people locate things is through stories and the things that happen to people. For example, there are parts of Kenya and Ethiopia that Somalians consider to be part of Somalia. Yes, there are borders, but their people go beyond them into other parts that they consider to still be their nation."
In order to capture this sentiment, we proposed the use of hand-drawn maps that depict circumstances and incidents, rather than just coordinates. The content for these illustrated maps were also contributed by us, having gone through their supplementary reports and collating geographic markers per country.
Cartography
In addition to the illustrated maps, we also built ai2html scrolly maps to preface every country chapter, as the clients were keen on including cartographic components to present context-setting data.
The Result
While the research we were tasked with communicating was fairly matter-of-fact, we attempted to add richness to the story through interesting visual interventions such as illustrated maps and scrollytelling graphics.
View the live project ↗