Food support to the conflict-affected communities in Afrin district The fund will be utilized to providing the irreplaceable food items needed by distributing the food vouchers, which will contribute to supply these items for the IDPs and host in the targeted locations (Ma'btali, Enab, Mreimin Afrin and Basuta). This proposal is aimed to help the affected people of crisis cope with the urgent need for food due to the crisis and lack of access to food and high food prices through increasing access to needed basic food items and as well as to improve local market accessibility through Food voucher program lead to strengthening the resilience of vulnerable IDPs and host communities in the targeted communities.
Some 850 households (about 5,350 individuals), consisting mainly of poor IDPs women and households headed by the women, will benefit from the project. Each monthly voucher is worth 24.000 SP, or about US$ 50, and can be exchanged for food items in selected local shops. The implementation plan is based on the distribution of monthly vouchers to beneficiary families so that each family will benefit from four consecutive months of vouchers program, in other words, 850 families will benefit for four months.
Targeted people who will be Eligible to our support as beneficiaries, they will be selected based on set criteria which will be developed with local communities and taking into consideration lack of food availability and accessibility, lack of economic access to markets, precarious livelihoods, indebtedness, nutrition deficiency, and use of negative or extreme coping mechanisms.
Silk Road will contribute around $ 225,000 over a five-month period, which will enable food assistance through monthly cash vouchers to extremely vulnerable urban households in Ma'btali, Jandairis and Basuta. Silk Road will provide three locations to be used as voucher distribution centres (One centre in each location).
For the 850 targeted families, the vouchers mean guaranteed access to food every month. Beyond that, the project also gives them the chance to choose which foods will best meet their families’ needs (Criteria explained in section 3. Description of Beneficiaries).
For local sellers, the vouchers are creating hundreds of new customers, most of whom previously had difficulties affording to buy food in their shops. In this project, we will use conditional cash vouchers (Food for a fixed monetary value (value-based vouchers) in the selected shop) that allow sufficient flexibility for the beneficiaries, where they can buy any of the items included in the voucher according to the voucher amount. Modality selection (Voucher) included cost efficiency, positive and negative secondary market impacts, security and corruption risks in addition to the risks to beneficiaries, staff and communities that were assessed and deemed acceptable. Also, Silk Road will conduct pre-assessment of the beneficiaries prior to distribution in the first month of the project. then we will conduct mid-assessment after two months of the distribution and finally we close the project and conduct post-assessment. The pre and mid- assessment is considered an important phase of the program which will play a vital part in the learning process in the first two months of the distribution and that will give us a strong in the implementation and development for the next two months of the distribution. The process of voucher disbursement and the monitoring and evaluation of disbursements will begin in the next month of the project and this process will include daily monitoring, reporting of lost and damaged, price control and challenges (The process can also include secret shoppers).
The list of commodities includes Rice 15 KG/ F, Chickpeas 5 KG/F, Lentils 5 KG/Family, Beans 6 kg, Vegetable Oil 5 KG/F, Olive Oil 5 KG/F, Sugar 10 KG/F, Wheat flour 12 KG/F, Pasta, Macaroni 5 KG/F, and Iodized salt 1 KG/F. It is strictly forbidden to sell the goods/ commodity not mentioned in the above list and also to the sale of alcohol, cigarettes and NF