How We Verify Our Data

We use primary institutional sources: UN agencies and their data portals, official statistical offices, and established research organizations that publish their own methodology. Secondary reporting is only used to locate a primary document, never as the source of a figure. Each claim records the publishing organization and the exact document it came from.

A figure is only published after it is entered in our claims registry with four required fields: the value, the source organization, a direct link, and an evidence quote copied word for word from the source. Pages render statistics from that registry, so the number a reader sees and the number we verified are the same record. Changes to the registry are reviewed before release.

Each claim carries a last-verified date, listed in the registry table below and shown alongside statistics in context. We re-check figures when the publishing organization issues an update and review the oldest entries first. Where a source has not been reissued, we keep the original value and its date rather than presenting stale data as current.

Humanitarian and social statistics are estimates produced under difficult conditions. Coverage gaps, restricted access, differing definitions between agencies, and reporting lags all mean two credible sources can disagree. We report the source rather than reconciling values silently, and we flag any figure we could not verify instead of substituting an approximation.