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
3-Community Engagement
The HFOs and the HFAs 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 info 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
A service mapping application for mobile phones will be maintained that provides IDPs, local communities, and humanitarian actors with information on the availability of services in different locations with the aim of facilitating access to services and assisting humanitarian actors in planning. This will provide info on services (camp locations, bakeries, clean water resources, health facilities, protection, etc.), whether provided by humanitarian or non-humanitarian entities, so that people will be able to access them. The application will include a special part for awareness-raising which would play an important role in the COVID 19 prevention campaign and can also be used for Mine Risk Awareness and similar issues. Trainings and humanitarian job postings can also be posted in the app. Clusters provide much of the info on services in the app
The project builds on the outcomes of a previous project completed earlier in 2020. The info-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. This system will be expanded in the new project. 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, which will continue. The service mapping app was created after gaps were identified in providing info on services to people in need during large displacements. It was recently launched and it has been well-received by people in need, clusters, and other stakeholders. Building on this success, it now needs to be expanded to include more communities and contain more information, for which focal point assistants inside Syria will gather data for the application and conduct related local outreach.
HFOs training and visits log will be attached to the proposal.