Attachments
A message from the Country Director
In 2015, the World Food Programme (WFP) continued to assist food insecure populations in Iraq, making breakthroughs in some of the most unstable parts of the country, including Anbar and Mount Sinjar during the winter snow and rain. We continued to make progress with the consolidation of the 2016 Humanitarian Response Plan (HRP) and our programming for the New Year.
In early December, after many months of hard work, WFP and its local partner were able to deliver food donated by the Government of Iraq to 70,000 people in the besieged towns of Haditha and Al Baghdadi in Anbar governorate, which had not received humanitarian assistance since April 2015.
I was thrilled with this widely acknowledged achievement, and WFP is hoping to continue this successful collaboration with the Government of Iraq in the New Year.
Responding to the needs of those who had fled Sinjar, WFP and its local partners were also the first humanitarians in the area, providing in-kind assistance to 17,000 people living on and around Mount Sinjar with winterisation support. Coverage of these activities was supported by a Mission to Sinjar and Anbar to obtain first-hand accounts from beneficiaries of how they are benefiting from WFP food assistance, and how we can serve them better.
A pilot school feeding project providing healthy meals for school children in the southern governorate of Thi Qar is another highlight of WFP’s collaboration with the Government of Iraq.
This initiative aimed to prevent malnutrition among children and encourage their parents to keep them in school. A daily nutritious meal helps children grow into healthy adults.
In addition to assisting internally displaced Iraqis, we continued to assist thousands of Syrian refugees sheltering in the Kurdistan Region of Iraq (KRI) with food vouchers, with plans to transition them from paper voucher to e-vouchers implemented through the corporate electronic beneficiary management and delivery platform – SCOPE.
This puts WFP in Iraq at the forefront of the wider shift within the global humanitarian community towards Cash Based Transfers (CBT), providing a more dignified and less costly form of assistance.
Thousands of Iraqis continue to be uprooted from their homes, leaving behind their comfortable lives and livelihoods due to ongoing violence. Around 3.3 million people have been internally displaced, while approximately 10 million people across Iraq - nearly a third of the population - are in need of humanitarian assistance according to the HRP for 2016. Despite generous contributions from the international community, Iraq’s humanitarian needs continue to outpace available resources, which in turn affects the humanitarian community’s capacity to reach all vulnerable people in a consistent manner. In 2016, we aim to continue to reach 1.5 million of Iraq’s displaced population on a monthly basis, bringing them the assistance they need to survive the ongoing conflict.
Jane Pearce Representative and Country Director