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Iraq

Iraq: Humanitarian Access Severity Overview (April 2021)

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DISTRICT ACCESS SEVERITY AS PERCEIVED BY HUMANITARIAN ACTORS

In April 2021, OCHA conducted focus group discussions (FDGs) with partner organisations including UN agencies, INGOs and national NGOs, to systematically collect and distil perceptions of access challenges in central and northern Iraqi governorates. The findings for all organisation types and for all districts were applied to a three-point severity scale. The median scores indicate the overall access severities of districts.

The focus group discussions found that approximately 24 per cent of districts covered by the HRP had moderate to high levels of access difficulties. The districts with the highest access restrictions (15 of 60) mostly fall within the central and northern governorates of Anbar, Baghdad, Diyala, Kirkuk, Ninewa and Salah Al-Din.

Discussion participants indicated a general improvement in district-level access conditions since October 2020, when roughly 47 per cent of districts were determined to have moderate to high access difficulties.

Previously, in the first ten months of 2020, humanitarian access had significantly deteriorated in Iraq compared to access conditions at the end of 2019. However, district-level humanitarian access has generally improved following the reestablishment of the federal government’s access authorization mechanism for granting access to NGOs operating in federal areas in October 2020.

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