Turkey has the largest refugee population in the world, with a total of over 3 million registered refugees. Most of them are from Syria but there are also refugees from Afghanistan, Iraq and Iran. The majority live not in camps but in the poor areas of Turkey’s towns and cities. Although they are safe from war, many refugee families live in challenging conditions and struggle to build stable, normal lives.
The Emergency Social Safety Net (ESSN) programme aims to help the most vulnerable of these refugee families by providing them with an ESSN debit card charged with about 28 euros (120 Turkish Liras) per family member per month. They can use the money to buy whatever they need most for their families: food, fuel, rent, medicine and bills.
The ESSN card can be used in shops, just like a normal debit card. But it is not just a cash card. It’s an acknowledgement that, despite their hardships, refugees should have the right to choose how to manage their lives.
The ESSN is the largest humanitarian programme that the European Union has ever funded and draws on the World Food Programme’s expertise in handling large-scale cash programmes in the Middle East and elsewhere. Financed with a start-up budget of €348 million, the ESSN programme has already helped more than 500,000 refugees and aims to reach more than one million in Turkey in 2017.