Methodology: In November 2019, OCHA conducted focus group discussions (FDGs) in with partner organisations, including UN agencies, INGOs and national NGOs, to systematically collect and distil the opinions and perceptions of participants on the access challenges in central and northern Iraqi governorates. The district findings for all organisation types were applied to a three-point severity scale, ranging from ‘accessible’ to ‘high access constraints’, and the median scores indicate the overall access severities of districts.
Focus group discussions with humanitarian organizations conducted by OCHA in mid-November 2019, found that almost half of the districts covered by the HRP were characterized by partners as having moderate to high access difficulties. Districts with moderate to high access difficulties (29 of 61) mostly fall within the in central and northern governorates of Anbar, Baghdad, Diyala, Kirkuk, Ninewa and Salah Al-Din; and more than half of Iraq’s 4.1 million people in need, or 2.1 million people (929,474 people in acute need), including more than 552,000 IDPs live in these areas. Nearly 53 per cent of humanitarian organizations are operating in districts with moderate levels of access constraints, with seven per cent of organizations operating in the three districts with the highest access difficulties—Sinjar and Al Hatra (Ninewa Governorate) and Balad (Salah Al-Din Governorate).