Turkey: UNICEF Turkey Humanitarian Situation Report #35, July - Sept 2019
Highlights
• In September, UNICEF and Ministry of National Education (MoNE) launched a nationwide campaign to support the registration of refugee children for the start of the 2019-2020 school year. Over 684,000 refugee children have enrolled and nearly 526,000 children benefitted from the Conditional Cash Transfer for Education (CCTE) Programme.
• Between July-September, over 50,300 individuals benefitted from child protection services and nearly 8,300 refugee children participated in structured, sustained psychosocial support (PSS) programmes.
• UNICEF Turkey faces a 32 per cent funding gap under the 2019 3RP appeal. Additional flexible funding is urgently required to continue essential interventions for vulnerable refugee children, particularly in the area of education.
Situation Overview & Humanitarian Needs
Turkey remains home to the largest registered refugee population in the world, with over four million refugees and asylum-seekers now registered in Turkey. Nearly 3.7 million Syrians—including over 1.6 million children—are under temporary protection, 96 per cent of whom live in host communities.
Turkey also hosts approximately 370,000 non-Syrian refugees and asylumseekers, including some 120,000 children.1 In addition, Turkey remains a leading transit country for unregistered refugees and migrants on the move. From July to September, over 70,000 refugees and migrants—primarily Afghanis, Syrians and Iraqis—attempted to cross by sea and land from Turkey into the EU, a 62 per cent increase compared to the same period in 2018. Of these, over 27,7002 successfully arrived in Greece and Bulgaria, while over 25,500 people were rescued or intercepted at sea and more than 16,100 were apprehended on land by Turkish authorities. 3 Of those who successfully crossed so far in 2019, approximately 37 per cent are believed to be children. The significant spike in irregular migration during the reporting period can be attributed to warmer weather and calmer seas, as well as an increasingly restrictive environment for refugee and migrant populations in Istanbul and other urban centres along the western and northern coasts.
