Madad, EU Syria Trust Fund

Description What is done in the programme or project and why, what results are pursued, who benefits from the activities and who are involved in the implementation.

The overall objective of the Trust Fund is to provide a coherent and reinforced aid response to the Syrian crisis on a regional scale, responding primarily in the first instance to the needs of refugees from Syria in neighbouring countries, as well as of the communities hosting the refugees and their administrations, in particular as regards resilience and early recovery. The Trust Fund will thus focus on current priority needs and may also be adapted to reconstruction needs in a future post-conflict scenario. Assistance inside Syria will be considered taking into account, and avoiding overlap with, the action of other existing international funding instruments, and depend on agreement with the Syria Recovery Trust Fund, which Finland is also funding. The fund has been established for five years and the Finnish support is proposed to be 3 MEUR, which is also the threshold level for seat on the Operational Board. The initial size of the fund was 45 MEUR (Commission 37, Italy 3 and Germany 5). So far the Fund has financed three projects: 1) schooling in Turkey (17,5 MEUR); 2) regional higher education and training programme in Syria and its neighbors (12 MEUR); and 3) livelihoods of refugees and host communities in Jordan and Lebanon (10 MEUR). The decisions were made at the first Operational Board meeting on May 2015. The emphasize has been on children, youth and anti-radicalization work, which works well with Finnish priorities as well. Currently the project pipeline includes 520 MEUR worth of projects from the call for proposals on summer 2015. Biggest applicant groups were 1) large European INGOs; 2) UNICEF; 3) ICRC; 4) Member States’ agencies; 5) UNRWA; and 6 ) IOM and UN-Habitat. Madad fund is supposed to work in tight strategic partnership with the UN but not channel the majority of its funding through UN agencies (roughly 30 %). The Trust Fund aims at funding larger interventions on which several NGOs pool their resources and funding, thus aiming to achieve economies of scale. Syria and its neighboring states are ODA-eligible as middle-income (low or high) countries. Syria itself, however, is probably de facto among the least-developed countries by now.