Syria 

Overview

In Northwest Syria, where 4.1 million out of the 4.9 million population are in need and 2.9 million are internally displaced, the humanitarian response faces significant challenges due to major underfunding and anticipated further cuts. In this challenging time, it is imperative to ensure the engagement of local stakeholders and diverse community groups to enable local ownership of response efforts, make sure the aid reaches those who need it most, and ensure local realities on the ground are understood. There are ongoing efforts to strengthen reactive feedback channels, such as hotlines, third-party monitoring, and field-staff visits; a sustainable, systematic process for proactively seeking and discussing the views of diverse community groups is still lacking. Northwest Syrian communities require an independent system that ensures ongoing and timely accountability. 

Our work

Since September 2023, in collaboration with UNICEF, Ground Truth Solutions has started a process to co-create a community-led accountability system. Through implementing a local and sustainable community research and dialogue process, GTS aims to make community influence on the response visible and embed local, community-led feedback processes into response management. Learning from this process is captured continuously and will contribute significantly to global policy and learning. 

GTS is currently working with local partners to understand the diverse community's perspectives on what an ideal accountability process looks like - the role community members want to play in it, issues that people want to address and share with the humanitarian community, safe methods for recording community feedback, existing community structures that could support research and advocacy, and how this process integrates into the broader accountability landscape in Northwest Syria.