VOICE featured in news article on ECHO funding
Last week, the European Commission announced its largest humanitarian grant in the €348 million Emergency Social Safety Net (ESSN) project, which comes as part of a support package to Turkey announced last year. Signed with the World Food Program, the contract is financing a tripartite agreement between WFP, the Turkish Red Crescent and the Turkish ministry of family and social policy aiming at providing 1 million refugees with monthly cash transfers. They should get monthly payments via a debit card to spend as they wish, whether on food, healthcare, housing, schooling, or other priorities.
Kathrin Schick called the project “totally extraordinary”, saying that The scale and nature of the Turkey portfolio for ECHO goes beyond the harmonica system of expanding and contracting budgets that ECHO has become used to.
She also it argued it could set a worrying precedent of ECHO being sucked into the unions political priorities, not to mention wider issues of humanitarian principles and the EU’s role as a global actor.
