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Syria

Turning data into action: Meeting humanitarian challenges amid funding shortfalls in Syria, May 2024 | Northern Syria

Attachments

KEY MESSAGES

• In the face of decreasing humanitarian funding, the effective utilisation of impartial, independent, and comprehensive evidence and analysis at all levels of the humanitarian response is essential to ensure that aid programming is tailored to the needs of vulnerable Syrians. Data plays a crucial role in guiding resource targeting and prioritisation, while ensuring accountability to affected populations.

• As funding shortages have led to significant reductions in humanitarian assistance, notably the cessation of the World Food Programme’s General Food Assistance operations, emerging data provides an important baseline to identify the first impacts of the food aid cuts and ensure that life-saving assistance reaches those most in need.

• The cuts in food assistance have impacted over a million internally displaced persons (IDPs) in sites across Northwest Syria, as well as out-of-camp IDPs and host communities across Northern Syria more broadly. Against the backdrop of a worsening economic crisis, these reductions threaten to destabilise markets and further increase prices. The reallocation of households’ limited incomes to purchase food risks undermining people’s ability to meet other essential needs and could exacerbate negative coping strategies.