# **1. Introduction**

There are nearly 80 million forcibly displaced people around the world, of which 26 million are refugees, who have fled from conflict and persecution in their home countries. There has been an unprecedented increase in refugee numbers in the world between 2012 and 2016, mainly driven by the conflict in the Syrian Arab Republic, although conflicts in other parts of the world including Afghanistan and Sub-Saharan Africa, as well as the influx of Rohingya refugees to Bangladesh have also contributed. Between 2010 and 2019, the number of displaced persons around the world nearly doubled from 41 million to 80 million. Similarly, the number of refugees under the United Nations Refugee Agency (UNHCR) mandate more than doubled from nearly 10 million to 20.4 million.<sup>1</sup> More than two-thirds of the refugee population come from only five countries: the highest number of refugees are from Syria, with nearly 6.6 million, followed by the República Bolivariana de Venezuela (3.7 million), Afghanistan (2.7 million), South Sudan (2.2 million) and Myanmar (1.1 million) (UNHCR 2019).

Turkey hosts the largest number of refugees in the world since 2014, with over 4 million refugees currently living in the country, including 3.6 million Syrians. In light of Turkey’s open-door policy towards Syrians fleeing the civil war, refugee numbers in Turkey increased sharply since 2011. Back then, the number of foreigners who applied for international protection in the country was only 18,000.<sup>2</sup> The hospitality of the Government of Turkey towards Syrian refugees has garnered international praise, although the rapid rise in the number of refugees in the country put significant strain on national resources to provide services for the new arrivals, as well as the host community.

The Emergency Social Safety Net (ESSN) program was launched in November 2016 with the partnership of the Government of Turkey and the European Union to support the most vulnerable refugees to meet basic needs by distributing unconditional cash transfers. The program was funded by the Directorate-General for European Civil Protection and Humanitarian Aid Operations and co-implemented through a partnership of the Turkish Ministry of Family, Labor and Social Services, the World Food Programme (WFP),<sup>3</sup> and the Turkish Red Crescent (TRC). To target the most vulnerable population, the ESSN relied on eligibility criteria based on demographic characteristics at the time of application, which served as a proxy for household vulnerability. The program has rolled out nationwide and scaled-up rapidly across the country. Currently, ESSN supports 1.7 million refugees in Turkey. As of May 2020, ESSN is the largest humanitarian cash transfer for international refugees in the world.

> 1 Excluding 5.6 million Palestinian refugees under the mandate of the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East (UNRWA).

> 2 DGMM International Protection Statistics https://en.goc.gov.tr/international-protection17.

> 3 Starting from April 2020, the International Federation of Red Cross and Red Crescent (IFRC) has taken over the coimplementation of the program from WFP.

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