DATA & METHODOLOGY

Every number on this site, with its source

One downloadable file holds every figure behind every chart we publish, with a source URL, a date and a verification status per figure. Reuse it — CC BY 4.0.

Compiled: 2026-07-26 4 charts 16 figures

Download chart-data.json

Sourcing standards

Every figure carries its own source URL and a verification status. 'verified' = the figure was read directly from the cited primary or near-primary source. 'reported' = the figure comes from a credible secondary report citing a primary source we did not open directly. 'unverified' = we could not confirm the figure against a primary source and it is published with an explicit on-page flag. Ranges are published as ranges, never collapsed to a midpoint.

What the badges mean

  • Sourced Sourced. Every figure was read directly from the primary or near-primary source named beneath it.
  • Reported Reported. At least one figure comes from a credible secondary report citing a primary document we did not open ourselves. Still sourced — the source line names which report — but one step further from the original.
  • Estimate Estimate. A projection or an order-of-magnitude figure. Projections are drawn hatched and at 40% opacity so they can never be mistaken for a recorded value.
  • Unverified figure Unverified figure. We could not confirm the figure against a primary source. We publish it with this flag, or we do not publish it.

Ranges are published as ranges

Where a source gives a range, we chart the range. We never collapse it to a midpoint and we never present a projection with the same visual weight as a recorded value.

All monetary figures are nominal US dollars at current prices unless stated. Euro figures converted at the rate cited in the source article, not at a rate we chose.

The Recovery Index method

The Recovery Index scores 21 indicators across 5 domains and combines them into one composite. It is the most method-dependent thing we publish, so the whole method is set out here rather than summarised.

Everything is anchored to December 2024, not to 2011

progress % = (current − Dec 2024 baseline) ÷ (target − baseline)

This is the one decision that makes the index different from most reporting on Syria. GDP per capita sits near 21% of its 2011 level — but it was already near 19% on the day Assad fell, so the recovery credit belongs to the 3% gained since, not the 21% of a pre-war benchmark. Scoring against 2011 would credit the transition with damage it did not undo. Every indicator on the page therefore runs from where Syria actually stood on 8 December 2024, and an indicator that has not moved scores near zero however close or far it sits from the pre-war normal.

Where the targets come from

Economic measures are scored against the average of five comparable neighbours — Jordan, Iraq, Egypt, Lebanon and Tunisia. Physical and population measures are scored against pre-war Syrian normal, because there is no sense in which a rebuilt house or a returned family should be benchmarked to Cairo. The neighbour set is a compromise and we say so in the gaps: Lebanon is itself in crisis, and a different comparator set would move the economic domain by a few points.

The domain weights, and why

The composite is the sum of each domain's mean score times its weight, and the five weights sum to 1. Within a domain the mean is unweighted, so a domain subdivided into six indicators cannot outvote one with three simply by being more finely cut. Across domains the weights are a judgement, and they are published so the judgement can be argued with:

Domain Weight Why this weight
People & Displacement 0.25 The largest share. Displacement is the biggest measurable human fact of the war, and returning home is the outcome most Syrians would themselves use to judge whether the country has recovered.
Housing & Shelter 0.20 The binding constraint: every displacement indicator above is gated on it. It is still one sector rather than four, so it does not take the largest share — but it is weighted above its share of the reconstruction bill because nothing else moves until it does.
Economy & Livelihoods 0.22 Household income and prices decide whether a return is permanent or temporary. Weighted just below People because it is a means to that end rather than the end itself.
Infrastructure & Basic Services 0.23 Power, water, health, schools and transport are what make a returned population viable rather than merely present. It spans six separate systems, which is why it carries nearly as much weight as People.
Institutions & Financing 0.10 Deliberately the smallest. It is the most reversible domain and the least measurable, and weighting it higher would let legal and diplomatic changes that cost nothing dominate a headline figure meant to describe physical recovery.

Sourced figures and Umran estimates are not the same claim

11 of the 21 indicators are figures no institution publishes. We derived them, and they carry a distinct badge on the bar itself — not in a footnote, and not folded into the ordinary sourcing badge. Conflating the two would let a number we assembled pass as a number someone else stands behind, and that is the one thing this publication cannot do.

  • Sourced Read directly from the named institution's published figure. The attribution under the bar says which institution and which release.
  • Umran estimate Derived by Umran from the sources named under the bar. Treat it as an order-of-magnitude reading with a stated basis, not as an institutional statistic — and check the bar's note, which says what the derivation rests on.

Open the Recovery Index →

Charts in the dataset

ID Title Verification Sources
chart-1 Syria's reconstruction bill dwarfs every pool of money currently on the table Reported World Bank, Syria Physical Damage and Reconstruction Assessment 2011–2024
Karam Shaar Advisory, 'Mapping MoUs in Syria: Shifting Investment Agendas', Syria in Figures Issue 14
The Arab Weekly / EU Brussels IX 'Standing with Syria' conference, 17 March 2025
chart-2 Rebuilding costs twice what the damage was recorded at — and housing is where the gap is widest Sourced World Bank, Syria Physical Damage and Reconstruction Assessment 2011–2024
chart-3 Inflation collapsed, the budget flipped to surplus, and growth turned — all within three years Sourced World Bank, Macro Poverty Outlook — Syrian Arab Republic, April 2026
chart-4 The single biggest economic change of 2026 was territorial, not financial Estimate Al Jazeera, 'It's expensive: Syria's electricity has improved, but challenges remain'
World Bank, Macro Poverty Outlook, April 2026

The figure index

Every figure we have published in prose rather than in a chart, with its source and its verification status. This is the list to check before quoting us, and the list to search if you want to know whether we hold a number at all.

16 of 16 figures

What we don't know

Publishing the gaps is part of the method. These are figures readers reasonably expect us to have and that no reliable source provides. We will not invent them.

  • No reliable national average for daily electricity supply hours exists. Ministerial claims (24h in some areas, April 2026), field reporting (5–6h in Damascus, July 2026) and secondary summaries (~4h nationally) are mutually inconsistent because they measure different things in different places. Umran will not publish a single national figure until a metered source exists.
  • No per-governorate dollar figures for damage or reconstruction cost are public. The World Bank names Aleppo, Rif Dimashq and Homs as worst-affected but publishes no values. Any governorate-level chart would be fabricated.
  • No public data on how much of the USD 25.9bn in signed MoUs has actually been disbursed. This is the single most important missing number in Syrian reconstruction reporting and is the reason Umran's Project Tracker exists.
  • Remittance inflows are effectively unmeasured post-2020. World Bank series for Syria has no recent observations. Any 'diaspora sends $X billion' claim should be treated as unsourced.
  • Housing units rebuilt, schools reopened, and hospitals restored are not published as a national time series by any body we could find.
  • UNICEF's 2.45 million out-of-school figure is dated 2025 and may not reflect the return of over 1.6 million refugees since.

Corrections log

Correcting in public is part of the method, so the log has its own page rather than a section here. It lists every correction we have issued, dated, with the piece it belongs to — and the policy that governs them.

Open the corrections log →

Citing this data

The files at the site root change as the trackers are updated, so a citation pointing at them will drift away from what you quoted. Every month we freeze an immutable copy under a dated path. Cite the dated path — it will still return the same bytes in two years.

Suggested citation

Umran (2026). Reconstruction and cost-of-living datasets. Version 2026-07 [data set], 2026-07-28. https://www.umransyria.com/data/2026-07/ (CC BY 4.0).

Frozen versions

The live files — /chart-data.json, /projects.json, /cost-of-living.json — always hold the current figures. Use them to read, use a dated snapshot to cite.

Licence and reuse

CC BY 4.0 — reuse with attribution to Umran and to the original source listed per figure.

Download chart-data.json