Monitoring and Impact Analysis of the BMZ and EU-funded FAO Resilience Programme in Syria

The objective of this report is to present insights of a statistical analysis of recent survey data from Syria to support FAO Syria in building knowledge, learning and capacity. Our analyses reveal a set of very clear results, which have important policy implications.

Our empirical analysis con rms that food security in Syria has been strongly affected by the crisis and climatic conditions. Our key findings are:

• Food security deteriorated dramatically during, and due to, the crisis.
• Our statistical analysis of the empirical data from the Agricultural Damage and Needs Assessment (ADNA) and the Crop and Food Security Assessment Mission (CFSAM) background studies documents very critical food security outcomes in 2016, across all four pillars of food security and across the whole country.
• A comparison with data from 2010 demonstrates and quantifies the dramatic degradation in food security since the start of the crisis.
• In addition, many regions have been affected by weather shocks such as droughts in recent years

Our analysis emphasises that droughts impair food security in two ways:

• First, droughts have the expected direct, negative effects on food security.
• Second, droughts also exacerbate the adverse impacts of the crisis, pushing many household into extreme emergency.

Concerning the impact of the FAO programme, we document four main findings:

• First, the programme successfully supported local production chains, filling in the gap created by conflict-induced institutional weakness.
• Second, our statistical analysis reveals that the provision of seeds delivered substantial and critically important impacts on yields, food security and resilience measures.
• Third, we find that vulnerable households, such as female-headed households, benefited tremendously from the programme.
• Fourth, as the trainings targeted the most vulnerable, it remains to be seen how much the provision of trainings strengthens these positive impacts for the average household. is will require more detailed information and longer-term analysis of the specific trainings offered.