Syrian Arab Republic: Humanitarian Access Severity Overview (March 2024)

Background and methodology

Humanitarian access signifies the ability of humanitarian actors to reach populations affected by crises, as well as affected populations’ ability to reach humanitarian assistance and services. Humanitarian access is therefore a fundamental pre-requisite to effective humanitarian action. Full and unimpeded humanitarian access is essential to establishing humanitarian operations, moving humanitarian goods and personnel where they are needed, providing services, conducting evidence-based humanitarian needs assessments, carrying out other context-relevant humanitarian activities, and for affected populations to be able to fully benefit from the humanitarian assistance and services made available.

On a bi-annual basis, humanitarian partners working in Syria collectively produce and Access Severity Overview (ASO) that gauges the impact that humanitarian access constraints have on 1) the ability of humanitarian partners to reach people in need (PiN) and 2) the ability of the people in need to reach humanitarian assistance across all three humanitarian response modalities; the Humanitarian Country Team (HCT), the Humanitarian Liaison Group (HLG) and the NES NGO Forum (NESF) in all 270 sub-districts of Syria, where 16.7 million people are in need of some form of humanitarian assistance.

The ASO exercise included organizing multiple focus group discussions (FGDs) with humanitarian partners working in the field – UN agencies, INGOs and NNGOs – aimed at soliciting inputs/perceptions from humanitarian workers on main access challenges and their impact on the humanitarian operation using a 5-point severity scale. Outcomes from the exercise will be used to formulate strategies focused on mitigating the impact humanitarian access constraints have on the humanitarian operation.

This is the fifth ASO information product for the Whole of Syria (WoS) since July 2021.

Key findings (as of March 2024)

A total of 49 focus group discussions (FGDs) were facilitated by humanitarian access units/teams from the three humanitarian response modalities in Syria. FGDs were organized in December 2023 and January 2024 covering the period between July and December 2023. This fifth edition of the Humanitarian Access Severity Overview also features contextual updates between January and March 2024 from all three response modalities. After compiling the results, severity of access was to be as follows:

• Very low in 17 sub-districts (representing 14 per cent of the PiN – 2,361,178 people)
• Low in 50 sub-districts (representing 23 per cent of the PiN – 3,778,578 people)
• Moderate in 129 sub-districts (representing 50 per cent of the PiN – 8,416,562 people)
• High in 69 sub-districts (representing 12 per cent of the PiN – 2,057,224 people)
• Very high in five sub-districts (representing one per cent of the PiN - 47,928 people)