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Advocacy Brief: Cross-border aid mechanism to Northwest Syria in limbo, threatening to worsen already dire humanitarian conditions - July 2023

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KEY MESSAGES

• Northwest Syria (NWS) is currently facing unprecedented humanitarian needs and a deteriorating economic situation.
The end of the cross-border mechanism for UN aid threatens access to food, medical care, vaccines, clean water, shelter and protection services for 2.7 million people on a monthly basis, a gap that non-UN funded contracted organisations will struggle to fill. This will likely further erode purchasing power and drive the adoption of negative coping strategies by people in need.

• The withdrawal of UN cross-border humanitarian assistance will increase the need to scale up cash assistance to meet the needs of those previously receiving in-kind aid. However, markets will likely struggle to meet the scale of increased demand from a rapid shift to cash programming and local procurement for humanitarian programming.
Such a shift would require complementary programming to support livelihoods, businesses, supply chains, and local production.

• The UN cross-border response supports certain sectors that can not be served by local production and local aid actors will likely struggle to import goods commercially at such a scale to meet needs. This is likely to most heavily impact health services and the provision of life-saving medicines that cannot be procured locally