Centrality of Protection
A key priority is strengthening the centrality of protection analysis and advocacy across humanitarian architecture. Protection monitoring and assessment data underscore the need for deeper trend analysis on GBV, child protection violations, arbitrary detention, explosive ordnance risks, HLP violations, and movement restrictions, to ensure that decision-making accurately reflects the realities faced by civilians. Particular attention will be directed to protection risks linked to returns, including documentation gaps, housing insecurity, and limited access to essential services. Recent findings continue to highlight persistent risks-such as exposure to GBV, psychosocial distress, barriers to obtaining civil documentation, and insecurity around HLP rightsdemonstrating that vulnerabilities remain widespread. Evidence based advocacy will therefore remain central to addressing restrictive administrative environments, enhancing access to services, and ensuring that protection considerations guide return oriented planning. Advocacy will also promote adherence to international protection standards, including the voluntary, safe, and dignified nature of return. Achieving this will require sustained investment in protection monitoring, coordination, and information management capacities, including strengthened subnational structures, to enable context specific analysis and a coherent, collective response.
AAP and People-centred response
Priorities for 2026 include strengthening a collective, neutral, inter-agency feedback and complaint mechanism and improving the use of participatory data to ensure more effective and equitable assistance targeting. The collective CFM will work in coordination with agencylevel systems to promote consistent standards across the response. Reaching individuals who face social stigma or barriers to reporting will be critical; this will require expanding multichannel engagement across all participating agencies, including face-to-face, hotline, digital, and communitybased platforms. Efforts will prioritise improving equitable access to accountability systems for women, older persons, and persons with disabilities, while enhancing awareness of entitlements and available complaint pathways. Assistance efforts will also focus on addressing geographic inequities in coverage and reinforcing demand program design, ensuring stronger alignment between response modalities and community preferences. This includes institutionalising the systematic use of participation data and feedback analysis within HPC processes to strengthen transparency, trust, and responsiveness across all governorates.
PSEA
Sexual exploitation and abuse (SEA) undermine the trust between the humanitarian community and the people we seek to assist. It betrays humanitarian values and tarnishes the credibility of the entire humanitarian operation. SEA remains a severe risk in Syria, ranked 3rd of 38 IASC Priority Countries in the 2025 SEARO index. Protracted conflict, economic decline and displacement deepen aid dependency, while the 2025 MSNA highlights major access barriers, low awareness of reporting, unsafe access to sanitation facilities, inadequate supervision, and reliance on intermediaries-heightening exposure to SEA. The iRPT 2020 Syria data and Syria Safeline data show inconsistent reporting and low access to medical/legal/socioeconomic support, many cases with “unknown assistance status,” and underdetection of child survivors, reflecting weak documentation and coordination. Capacity assessments indicate uneven readiness: few trained investigators, overstretched focal points, partial community engagement, and inconsistent partner due diligence. These systemic gaps across prevention, reporting, investigation and survivor support demand robust, harmonized PSEA safeguards embedded across the HNRP.
The planned PSEA priority actions for 2026 will focus on the following measures that aim to bolster accountability, rebuild community trust and secure, safety, dignity, and equitable access to assistance.
Strengthening visible leadership, an active InterAgency PSEA Network led by the Humanitarian/ Resident Coordinator and enforced minimum operating standards for all HCT partners.
- Systematically integrating SEA risk mapping and mitigation across sector response strategies.
- Reinforcement of the interagency feedback and complaint mechanism to provide safe, confidential, accessible reporting.
- Application, of a survivor-centred approach ensuring timely access to integrated medical, psychosocial, legal, socioeconomic and protection services, irrespective of investigation decisions.
Ensuring prompt, impartial investigations by trained personnel, and regularly assess and strengthen implementing partner capacities.
Gender
In 2026, nearly 4.3 million women and girls are projected to require lifesaving humanitarian assistance. Across Syria, women and girls continue to face greater barriers than men and boys in safely accessing aid and essential services.
In Syria, FHHs face heightened economic and protection risks and are more likely to be unable to afford education, health services, nutrition, and essential nonfood items. For example, the FSA shows that FHHs are less food secure (12 per cent) compared with male-headed households (18.5 per cent). Returning FHHs have encounter compounded challenges, including inadequate shelter, limited access to basic services, and a lack of civil documentation. Barriers to health care are significant: two in every ten women report being unable to access the care they need due to cost, distance, insecurity, and mobility constraints. For the first time, the MSNA included questions on care responsibilities, revealing that women serve as primary caregivers in 95.1 per cent of households, with more than twothirds spending two to six hours per day on unpaid care work. This disproportionate burden restricts their mobility, wellbeing and limits access to incomeearning opportunities.
Aligned with the Humanitarian Reset and the IASC Gender Policy, the 2026 humanitarian response will ensure that the voices, experiences, priorities, and leadership of Syrian women and girls shape and guide the response. Key priorities include:
- Targeted support for women and girls at greatest risk, including FHHs, widows, wives of the disappeared, internally displaced women and returnees, adolescent girls, and women with disabilities, through protection-sensitive and inclusive interventions.
- Institutionalising gender analysis and gender mainstreaming across the humanitarian programme cycle, ensuring all interventions are informed by timely, intersectional analysis and gender, age, and disability disaggregated data.
- Tracking and increasing funding for Women-Led Organizations through strengthened monitoring of allocations and improved access to humanitarian funding to enhance accountability and impact.
Promoting the leadership and participation of Women-Led Organizations across humanitarian coordination structures, including the HCT, ISCG, sectors, and sub-national coordination systems.
The humanitarian community will continue engaging with government counterparts, civil society, the private sector, and womenled and Youth-Led organizations to ensure sustained attention to the protection, rights, and leadership of women and girls throughout the response and promote positive social norms that address the root causes of gender inequality.
Disability
Humanitarian partners will continue to refine their analysis and understanding of needs of people with disabilities, including through enhanced data collection and greater involvement of people with disabilities in assessments, and better outreach to people with disabilities at individual and household levels with regular, tailored assistance, including by ensuring that no decisions concerning persons with disabilities are taken without their effective participation. Ensuring coordination between stakeholders in a position to address specific needs of people with disabilities and improving access to multi-sectoral services will also be a key strategy. These strategies aim to achieve equitable access to life-saving services and assistance for all people in need, building on the guiding principles for inclusive action outlined in the UN Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities (UNCRPD).
2.5.2 Strategic Use of Country-Based Pooled Funds
The OCHA-managed Country-Based Pooled Funds (CBPF) remain the quickest and most flexible modality for disbursing funding to partners and enabling timely response. In 2025, $99.2 million to 80 projects, responding to the key priorities laid out in the 2025 Humanitarian Response Priorities and new emergencies including the March 2025 crisis in the coastal governorates, As-Sweida crisis, wildfires in the coastal governorates, and December 2025 Aleppo conflict. The SHF allocated $ 50.2 million and SCHF allocated a total of $48.7 million. The two CBPFs continued to play a key role in strengthening local response capacity, at least 54 per cent of the funds allocated in 2025 went to National NGOs.
At the end of June 2025, the two funds transitioned into a single CBPF managed centrally in Damascus. The SCHF continues to oversee the implementation of the funds allocated in 2025 prior to the complete phase out of its activities.
In 2026, the SHF will continue to mobilize and channel resources to humanitarian partners to rapidly address the most critical emergency response needs for the millions of people affected by the humanitarian crisis in Syria. The Fund operates under the leadership of the Humanitarian Coordinator, within the parameters of the 2026 HRP, and in accordance with priorities identified by the Humanitarian Country Team including the sector and inter-sector coordination group.
Syria has also benefitted from funds allocated by the Central Emergency Response Fund (CERF), which have also been critical in supplementing assistance to under-funded emergencies and rapid response to new emergencies. CERF allocations are implemented in strategic complementarity with CBPF allocations.