Emergency Shelter Construction, Shelter Repair and Core Relief Items Assistance to Conflict and Flood Affected IDPs, COVID-19 Prone IDPs and Returnees in Dawa, Liben and Shebelle Zones of Somali Region The Somali region, despite recent political reforms in Ethiopia, remains struggling with the burden of hosting internally displaced persons by manmade and natural disasters. In the Shebelle zone of the Somali region, huge IDP population resides mostly displaced due to clan conflicts as well as floods that affected thousands of people living around the banks of Shebelle river. In the Dawa zone, there are two types of IDP caseloads. The IDPs were displaced from the border areas with Oromia region deep into the Somali Region until the conflict subsided and the IDPs who fled from the Oromia region with nothing more than personal possessions. Majority of the IDPs who were displaced from the border areas were returned to their original locations back to partially or totally destroyed houses and lost livelihoods. There are also IDPs remaining in different spontaneous or collective sites and with host community affected by the conflict or flooding in Dawa, Liben and Shebelle Zones requiring continued lifesaving and recovery assistance to sustain their lives and rebuild their livelihoods. 
The dire situation of IDPs in Ethiopia is currently exacerbated by the outbreak of COVID-19 pandemic that has reached in Ethiopia on March 13th, 2020. The pandemic creates an enormous strain on health care systems and economy of even advanced nations, no less in Ethiopia whose basic services are fragile and limited. Particularly, IDP populations living in either collective centres or spontaneous settlements are identified with the highest risk of COVID-19 infection.
 The proposed intervention will provide COVID-19 sensitive life-saving support to 5,181 displaced and returnee households, living in spontaneous IDP sites in Moyale, Deka Suftu and Mustahil. They have been impacted by inter-communal conflict as well as floods and are in critical need of emergency shelter, shelter repair kits and core relief items.
ZOA will target beneficiaries through a combination of in-kind and cash interventions for the provision of core relief items (V2a), emergency shelter kits and emergency repair kits (V4) as per the revised standard guideline of the ESNFI Cluster. ZOA will coordinate with HLP sub-cluster and protection clusters to ensure beneficiaries have the security of tenure and are protected from protection risks. ZOA will ensure adherence to IASC, WHO, national and cluster standards during the provision of assistance to protect beneficiaries from COVID-19 infection. ZOA applies an age, gender and diversity lens to all phases of the project cycle and will work closely with protection experts to maximize benefits and mitigate protection risks. 
ZOA has extensive experience in shelter and NFI interventions (both in-kind and cash) and will use lessons learned from previous interventions to ensure quality programming. During project implementation, ZOA will strictly adhere to the recently adopted targeting guideline, including undertaking protection risk analysis and working with affected communities to identify and mitigate their protection risks and measures to grant meaningful access to shelter solutions to the most vulnerable.
The project will be implemented over a period of 10 months while ZOA has the full support of the regional, zonal and woreda authorities for the implementation of the project. Through this project 5,181 beneficiary households or 31,086 individuals (5595 men, 6,839 women, 8,704 boys and 9,948 girls) in Moyale, Deka Suftu and Mustahil woredas will be reached. To determine the specific intervention modality applicable in all three project geographic locations, ZOA will conduct a market assessment to assess market accessibility, functionality, the capacity of vendors and to identify appropriate intervention modality.