Brussels, April 24 (CTK) – Supporting 24 schools in Syria and helping some 200,000 people endangered due to the civil war is currently the biggest project of the People in Need (CvT) organisation, Tomas Kocian, the CvT’s head of humanitarian programmes, told CTK on Tuesday.
The CvT takes part in a donors’ conference for Syria in Brussels organised by the UN and the EU on Tuesday and on Wednesday.
Within the conference, more than 80 delegations from across the world are expected to commit to ensuring aid at least as high as in 2017, when they provided aid bids worth 5.6 billion euros in total.
“In principle, most of the money that is collected in this way is then distributed within competitions, with dozens of organisations submitting their projects,” Kocian explained.
Health care, basic humanitarian aid and food distribution are the priorities of the Syrian projects, he said.
UN Secretary-General for Humanitarian Affairs Mark Lowcock warned this morning that there is a lack of funding for the necessary aid projects, which are being fulfilled from less than 23 percent. Out of the needed 3.5 billion dollars, only 800 million were available, he said.
According to the UN’s estimate, some 13.1 million of people need humanitarian aid in Syria due to the seven years lasting conflict.
Kocian highlighted that there were groups of people in Syria that were endangered by the conflict more than others, even though 85 percent of Syrians were living below the poverty line now.
“In Syria, there are 2.7 million of children that do not attend school, although they should be,” he said.
The situation is difficult also for women, who are targets of sexual violence and abuse due to being poor or widowed. Old people need protection, too, he said.
About 360 CvT’s local employees in Syria together with 20 foreigners are helping to provide food tickets and food in the northeast and northwest of Syria. They are also helping in dozens of smaller villages to reconstruct their infrastructure, secure drinking water supplies or restore wastewater treatment plants.
In the more stable areas, they are helping to promote crafts and restore agriculture.
They also try to cooperate with the local self-governing authorities and NGOs to help them work independently.
The CvT has been active in Syria since 2012. Although it does not operate in the areas controlled by Damascus, Kocian said he hoped this was only temporary as Bashar Assad’s regime’s attitude to letting in humanitarian aid was gradually changing.
