By Samya Kullab, Elise Knutsen
TAALABAYA, Lebanon: By the late afternoon, the children were already anticipating Abu Husam ambling into their informal tent gathering in the Bekaa Valley town of Taalabaya, carrying a much ogled cloud of bright pink cotton candy over his shoulder. Sure enough, his arrival sparked a flurry of sprinting children, but he turned each away; the sweets were not for them. “He picks the candy up from Zahle, every day, and sells them to the locals,” Umm Husam, a mother of four, said of her husband. “Since we were taken off the UNHCR’s lists, we’ve come to depend on his earnings from the cotton candy for our daily bread.”
On a good day, the family makes LL5,000 in net profit.
“Taken off the list,” is the term used by Syrian refugees to refer to the U.N. High Commission for Refugees’ re-prioritized targeted assistance that went into effect in October, excluding 60,000 refugee households from receiving monthly donations of baby kits, hygiene kits and, most sensitive among the suspended items, food. About half of them have appealed the decision and are awaiting the outcome.
WFP spokesperson Laure Chadraoui said the U.N. had been planning the transition from “blanket” to targeted aid for months.
“This is a standard procedure in any emergency,” she said.
Some refugees, however, expressed frustration at the U.N. agency’s apparent reticence to discuss the process by which individuals were included or excluded from “the list.”
“I really don’t know why, they didn’t give me a reason,” said Abu Khaled, an unemployed father of five who was informed, in October, that starting in November he would no longer be eligible for aid.
The men surveyed in the gathering complained that securing a job, mostly in the informal sector, was difficult, especially now that seasonal agriculture work was dwindling.
“There are too many of us,” added Abu Oday, whose family was also cut from assistance.
Some international organizations have registered grievances from individuals recently excluded from the UNHCR list.
“We have lot of refugees who are complaining,” the project coordinator from the Caritas Lebanon Migrant Center said.
The cuts have also further encumbered some local charities, whom the refugees turn to for supplementary aid.
“The aid that they [UNHCR] were providing was meeting a small share of the needs,” explained Sheikh Khaled Shaheen, a representative of the Union of Aid Agencies. “Now the excluded refugees are turning to us, but we can’t meet their needs either.”
The union provides monthly donations of LL50,000 for food, but a family can easily expend this in less than a week, he said.
Many families said they were indebted to local grocers, who allowed them to purchase food items on credit, knowing they might not be able to repay the total sum anytime soon.
“We fear the crime rate will increase if these men don’t find work and go hungry,” the sheikh said. Just last month, he added, a Syrian refugee man was caught breaking into a residential home, “to steal a jar of makdous.”
Many struggling to understand the rationale behind the targeted assistance program mistakenly turn to perceived patterns in household composition; something the UNHCR said simplified the complex computerized appraisal.
“They’ve excluded families that have men who are able to find work,” said a Taalabaya municipal worker, who requested anonymity, tasked with following up on the refugee situation in the area
UNHCR spokesperson Roberta Russo flatly denied this claim.
“It’s based on complex factors,” she said. “It’s not as though a family is cut off if there are is a young man who has a job.”
In order to identify those most in need among registered refugees, a formula was designed jointly by UNHCR and the World Food Program, using the former’s database. The formula itself was developed on the basis of a vulnerability assessment conducted in April that concluded 30 percent of refugees were able to meet their own needs. The assessment looked at a sample survey of 10,500 people.
Also, a nutrition assessment conducted by the World Food Program in March found that only 25 percent of households said food assistance was their main source of food. The rest, about 66 percent said they bought food with their own resources.
While Chadraoui admitted the algorithm used to select the most vulnerable refugees had its limitations, she did not think the high number of appeals called its reliability into question.
“We know that the selection process does not give the full picture,” she said. “This is why we have the verification exercise.”
Russo agreed, saying the number of appeals indicated that “the situation is very fluid.”
“Families who registered with us a few months ago could be in a situation now that is completely different, some might have fallen sick, or run out of resources,” she said.
Russo said it was not assumed that those excluded from assistance were thought to be capable of fending for themselves: “It’s very hard to find someone who isn’t in need of something. But we have to make sure the little resources we have is spent on those who are in the most need of it.”
With the UNHCR’s refugee response plan only 60 percent funded, the targeted assistance program is a means to scale back assistance to reflect financial shortfalls and the inability of the agency to secure blanket coverage.
“We are obliged to make very difficult decisions all the time,” Russo said.
The appeals process was a “one off” exercise to ensure needy refugees do not fall through the cracks, and is ongoing with visitations by outreach workers. Forms were distributed in 100 appeals boxes in community centers, clinics, distribution sites and shops across the country. A team of 2,000 aid workers have conducted over 17,000 family visits as of mid-November.
At any point, even after the formal appeals process is finished, refugees can request a home visit by agency representatives to reassess their status, Chadraoui said, describing verification efforts as a “continuous process that we do in order to identify these families that become vulnerable.”
Some refugees, like Abu Khaled, filled out appeals forms immediately after being informed of their ineligibility for aid. For others, however, navigating the process is more difficult.
“A lot of families can’t read or write,” said Rachel Routley of the Danish Refugee Council.
Preliminary findings of processing appeal forms indicate that about 30 percent of refugees were not reachable. While Russo said they might have changed phone numbers and where they were staying, the municipal worker at Taalabaya said that based on his observations, many had returned to Syria. Some, he claimed, only entered the country to register for assistance
Chadraoui said that the agencies “don’t expect a very high percentage” of refugees to be reinstated:
“Those very close to the ‘benchmark,’ they are most likely to be the ones that will be re-included.”
In light of the deepening crisis and limited resources, establishing a tenable, efficient refugee-assessment formula poses a challenge, some said.
“The real issue is how exactly this process is going to go in the future,” Routley said. “We’re going to have a lot more people coming in every month.”

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02/12/2013
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