Increasing Immediate Access to Food and Livelihood Opportunities in Central Rakhine The Increasing Immediate Access to Food and Livelihood Opportunities in Central Rakhine project will provide lifesaving emergency food security and livelihoods assistance to conflict-affected populations in Central Rakhine State. The project will meet immediate humanitarian needs, while building communal self-reliance and resilience, through productive asset creation for both communities and individual households. The project will target women’s participation in activities in order to improve access to gender transformative income generating opportunities. 

The project will directly assist 7941 persons (1340 HH, 1253 M, 1427 W, 2460 B, 2801 G) in Rohingya, Mro, and Rakhine communities in 16 villages of Kyauktaw and Ponnagyun, and will indirectly reach approximately 18,147 (2802 M ,3188 W, 5686 B, 6471 G) persons within and around these communities. Directly targeted villages include host communities including stateless people living outside displacement sites, and other vulnerable people. This will be achieved through two key outcomes:
1: Vulnerable households are enabled to meet their basic food needs and improve community resilience. This will be addressed through cash for assets implemented in 7 villages reaching 560 HHs.
2: Vulnerable households are provided with cash and in-kind resources to restore, protect and improve their livelihood opportunities. This will be addressed through home-gardening (440 HH), livestock (200 HH), and business start-up (140 HH) support through cash and in-kind inputs, as well as appropriate training. 

The project will also sensitize communities, including men and village leaders, on gender equality and engage women as participants in activities and cash management committees. Moreover, it will integrate land mine risk education and nutrition sensitization to community mobilization and training activities. It will also mainstream protection including Do No Harm principles, and conflict sensitivity throughout the implementation.

This project responds directly to the immediate needs of the vulnerable people as collected through community consultations by Meikswe Myanmar (MSMM) and World Vision Myanmar (WVM) in the target area in June 2019. It also responds to the needs expressed in the MHF Allocation Strategy and 2019 Humanitarian Response Plan, FAO/WFP Agriculture and Food Security Mission in 2018 (released July 2019), and the UN Women ‘Gender Profile for Humanitarian Action…’(January 2019). It will directly contribute to the Food Security Sector Objective 2 to ‘Enhance resilience of targeted communities to restore, protect and improve livelihood opportunities’ as well as the MHF SRP objective 2, to ‘Ensure that vulnerable, crisis-affected people have access to assistance, services and livelihoods opportunities.’

The partnership of World Vision Myanmar (WVM) and Meikswe Myanmar (MSMM) is strongly positioned to deliver this project combining WV’s strong technical expertise and recent experience including food distribution, cash for assets, livestock/agricultural inputs in Rakhine State, coupled with MSSM’s experience including cash for assets, presence and ability to access villages throughout Rakhine State. This ability has been proven through the MHF funded project, implemented by WV and MSMM in 2017-2018. The project will coordinate with other key actors, especially WFP WV has included regular monitoring visits in Rakhine which will be timed around coordination meetings allowing for full and active participation while WVM will support MSMM participation at cluster meetings as required, especially coordination with WFP.