The protracted nature of the Syrian crisis, coupled with the massive influx of Syrian refugees into Türkiye, has led to mounting demographic and economic pressure across the country. The project aimed to facilitate vulnerable individuals’ – host, refugee, and asylum seekers through “Access to Services & Rights” in Çorum & Samsun” through a community-based approach conducive to reducing vulnerabilities.
This project is initiated within the scope of the “Local Initiative Fund in Türkiye” “LIFT” Project which is co-financed by the European Union through its Civil Protection and Humanitarian Aid Operations (ECHO) and the German Federal Ministry for Economic Cooperation and Development (BMZ) and co-implemented by Deutsche Gesellschaft für Internationale Zusammenarbeit (GIZ), RET and LEAP in Türkiye.
It used community-based and center-based approaches, catering to different age brackets providing various services: Awareness Raising, Legal Counseling, Individual Counseling, Individual Protection Assistance- Early Identification and Safe Referral, Psychosocial Support (PSS), and Capacity Building Activity- Mainstreaming GBV in International Protection Forums.
The project targeted the respective communities at large through outreach activities serving two main objectives:
- information dissemination and awareness-raising regarding educational and protection opportunities available, including those provided by LEAP’s centers;
- identifying beneficiaries with protection concerns and/or educational needs that require further follow-up and support.
A community center was established around the Kunduzhan region, which is primarily populated by Iraqi refugees, providing geographical proximity, facilitating access, and fostering multicultural coexistence while delivering individual assistance and community-based protection activities. The designation of Kunduzhan district, where refugee communities reside, helped provide culturally appropriate space and facilitated women and adolescent girls’ participation whose mobility is traditionally highly restricted. RET and LEAP have conducted a preliminary needs-assessment with the refugee community and public authorities, including the Provincial Directorate of Migration Management, to identify the gaps in provisioning and access to protection services. With the establishment of community-center, LEAP created a safe space for the most vulnerable, where psychologists, social workers, and a lawyer are accessible equipped with additional skills of early identification of psychosocial stress and trauma, including GBV.
Two spaces in Çorum & Samsun were established. The center-based approach will allow beneficiaries:
(i) Regain some sense of normalcy given the trauma and psychosocial stress most have been exposed to or experienced as a result of forced displacement;
(ii) Feel emotionally and socially empowered through custom-tailored interventions;
(iii) Expand the female beneficiaries’ access to the public domain, by expanding their social network(s) beyond the prevailing societal limitations and restrictions imposed on them;
(iv) Overcome the information gap as related to protection services.
The two projects (Corum & Samsun), implemented respectively between October 2019 and August 2020, and September 2020 and February 2021 are co-financed by the European Union through its Civil Protection and Humanitarian Aid Operations (ECHO) and the German Federal Ministry for Economic Cooperation and Development (BMZ) and co-implemented by Deutsche Gesellschaft für Internationale Zusammenarbeit (GIZ) in Türkiye.