Humanitarian Field Officers This project will support cross-border operations from Turkey into Syria to tap into sources of information and share it for use by the humanitarian community through a team of humanitarian field officers in NSAG-controlled areas. The team will be managed by the HFOs management team based in Gaziantep, Turkey in consultation with OCHA Turkey. The project is designed to broadly support the formal coordination system, especially the clusters/ICCG, as It is based on four pillars.

1-Information gathering
This pillar focuses on gathering data from the ground to produce reports about the humanitarian situation and context and inform response and advocacy. The data is shared with the OCHA coordination unit for use in various platforms and products. Info on unmet needs, including urgent cases, will be shared with clusters to address
2-Support to monitoring of SCHF funded projects.
The HFOs will monitor projects funded by the SCHF. These monitoring missions will be conducted upon the request of the SCHF and based on SCHF monitoring criteria. Monitoring of SCHF projects directly improves the quality and accountability of the inter-cluster response, as projects funded by the SCHF are reviewed through the clusters. The HFAs will also receive a training on MampE tools and methods to ensure accurate and relevant information are gathered by them.

3-Community Engagement
The HFOs will conduct community engagement to strengthen humanitarian response through facilitating meetings with the affected community and the humanitarian community and other stakeholders obtaining feedback from the community on their needs and the response and providing information to affected people through awareness sessions and other means on the humanitarian response and the community’s rights and role in it. Community engagement informs the overall inter-cluster response and in some cases is organized on behalf of clusters.

4-Service Mapping
The existing service map app for mobile phones will get an upgrade to ensure ease of use and better accessibility such as “text-to-speech” for visually impaired people, and more visually-illustrated materials to assist people with reading/writing difficulties. The app will include a virtual information center that will 1)work as an awareness platform disseminating information on key issues such as AAP, COVID-19, and CHS  2)create an accessible repository of information for all affected persons and humanitarian actors to receive support and information to avoid duplication. 

The project builds on the outcomes of a previous project completed earlier in 2021. The information-gathering component is well-established and in recent months the mechanism for sharing specific needs data with clusters was streamlined and has resulted in individual cases receiving assistance. SCHF monitoring activities carried out so far have been well-received, resulting in one of the HFOs becoming largely dedicated to this work and the processes for monitoring becoming more formalized which will be further enhanced. Direct engagement with communities facilitated by the HFOs has allowed senior leadership, including the ERC, to provide high-level advocacy from key constituencies including women and PWDs. The service map app is now available in four languages and hosts over than 2,600 distributed between medical, educational emergency, and other types of services. It is also hosting ads from humanitarian actors, and hundreds of people have registered seeking for training. The app has been well received by people in need, clusters, and other stakeholders. Building on this success, BampZ is planning to conduct a promotion campaign to promote the service map application to ensure it is used by the relevant stakeholders as much as possible. A handover plan will also be set to shift the support of the app to another donor to ensure its sustainability.