Methodology: In April 2020, 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.
In the first quarter of 2020, humanitarian access significantly deteriorated in Iraq with a four-fold increase in the number of high severity districts since November 2019, as a result of the government suspension of national-level
access authorizations for non-government organisations (NGOs) in early December 2019, which was compounded by the COVID-19 pandemic and related containment measures. Of 4.1 million people in need of humanitarian
assistance in Iraq, more than 1.77 million (343,000 IDPs) live in districts with moderate to high access constraints in the governorates of Al-Anbar, Baghdad, Diyala, Kirkuk, Ninewa, Salah Al-Din and Sulaymaniyah.