ObjectivesFund scope
The Syrian Arab Republic is facing one of the world’s most challenging and complex emergencies. Humanitarian needs have risen by 32% since 2020, in a large part driven by an acute socioeconomic crisis. The impact of more than a decade of conflict on the country’s human and physical capital has been compounded by a series of cascading crises, including economic downturn in Lebanon, the consequences of the COVID-19 pandemic, one of the worst periods of drought in the country’s modern history and, more recently, the Ukraine crisis which has driven up global food and energy prices. With 97% of the population living below the poverty lines – despite over 60% of households having at least one employed household member, these trends are not easily resolved.
At the same time, funding for Syria is in the decline, as multiple other crises absorb donor attention. In this context, forging a resilience-oriented path for the most vulnerable populations is an imperative to respond to immediate lifesaving needs in complementarity with humanitarian assistance. This duality of approach which sits at the heart of ‘Nexus’ thinking, tackles the challenges of increasing humanitarian needs through more sustainable interventions that lessen the dependency on humanitarian assistance over time.
Having started as pilot intervention in Dara’a and Deir Ezzour in 2019, the JP has now matured to be one of principal joint programmes delivering across the UNCT. In offering a vital channel of support towards the wider resilience effort, the JP targets three interdependent levels of resilience: individual, household and community. Given the positive results of the JP in contributing to urban and rural resilience, with a focus on rural-urban linkages, and transforming local realities achieved during the pilot phase started in 2019, the phase 2 has been launched to apply the now tried and tested model of the JP and scale up this multisectoral response in other crisis-affected areas of the country where conditions are conducive to JP interventions.
Joint programming
The programme is implemented through a joint UN implementation modality, intended to achieve results aligned with strategic priorities. It is an advantageous modality as it identifies and builds on complementarities of different UN agencies, funds, and programmes, leveraging on their comparative advantages and expertise to deliver integrated solutions to multifaceted needs and challenges. This helps increase collective impact and make the best use of limited resources.
A pooled fund/pass-through mechanism
The programme is implemented through a pooled fund mechanism, intended to bring the UN agencies together to strengthen coherence of the response to the needs identified through bottom-up planning, reduce fragmentation, allow sharing risks with partners, and tackle multi-dimensional challenges. Resources are allocated by the Steering Committee to the six UN participating organizations. Using a pass-through mechanism, the programme is implemented by UN participating organizations and their partners following their own rules and procedures and retaining accountability for resources and results. A pass-through mechanism reduces transaction costs for the UN as well as for donors by using pre-agreed legal templates and harmonized terms for reporting, in addition to a flat and harmonized costing structure that avoids the cascading of overheads. In addition, a pass-through mechanism allows for consolidation of contributions from multiple financing partners, led by the UN Resident Coordinator (RC) and UNCT in the effort to capitalize the fund.
The JP modality, accompanied by a pooled fund mechanism, offers an enabling platform to enhance synergies, coherence and efficiency through cross learning, joint analysis, coherent planning, and joined-up implementation, to put into action the UN Development System Reform and operationalize the Triple Nexus approach into practice.
Area-based, bottom-up and risk-informed programming
The JP adopts an expressly area-based approach, which, in different contexts of the world, has shown to provide more impactful, sustainable results all while building social cohesion and empowering communities. By area-based, the JP envisions multi-sectoral, integrated efforts to address multidimensional resilience challenges in targeted areas. The JP is, therefore, by definition, multi-sectoral. It also entails adopting a whole-of-society, participatory approach, where the community in the targeted areas takes the lead in defining interventions. This in turn, requires a flexible approach that successfully tackles the area-specific problems with the inclusion and participation of all stakeholders while ensuring a timely response to sudden shifts in priorities. The latter is critical in a highly fluid context like Syria.
Programming decisions of the JP are informed by carefully designed consultations and workshops aiming to both build the capacities of communities to ensure meaningful engagement in participatory processes and also achieve transparent processes of arriving at agreed priority interventions. The priorities which emerge through workshop processes are then analysed by the JP Participating UN Organizations (PUNOs) who consider the balance of interventions in the target area.
> $55M 
$55M - $25M
$25M - $5M
< $5M
