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Kuwait Reaffirms Support to UN Migration Agency Operations in Syria

IOM Director General William Lacy Swing (right) with H.E. Jamal Al-Ghunaim, Ambassador of the State of Kuwait to the United Nations Office in Geneva (left), at IOM Headquarters in Geneva. Photo: Jorge Galindo/IOM 2017

Geneva – IOM Director General William Lacy Swing met yesterday (23/11) with the Ambassador of the State of Kuwait, Jamal Al-Ghunaim, at IOM Headquarters in Geneva. The meeting served as the handover ceremony of a generous contribution from Kuwait to the IOM response in Syria.

At the meeting, Ambassador Al-Ghunaim, Permanent Representative of the State of Kuwait to the United Nations Office and other International Organizations in Geneva, commended DG Swing on the work that IOM does to bring relief to people in need in the Middle East, and reaffirmed Kuwait’s commitment to support IOM in delivering quick assistance to people ravaged by conflict in the region.

“Kuwait funding is extremely timely and will support IOM’s emergency and resilience programming inside Syria in line with IOM’s whole of Syria appeal for 2018 which is being finalized and will be launched as part of the Syria Humanitarian Response Plan 2018 in December,” said DG Swing. “IOM’s appeal will focus on the following nine sectors of assistance: non-food items (NFI), shelter, early recovery and livelihoods, camp coordination and camp management (CCCM), logistics, Water, Sanitation and Hygiene (WASH), protection, coordination and health,” he added.

Currently, the IOM team for Syria operations consists of 289 staff including 33 international staff in Damascus, Gaziantep and Amman hubs. IOM operations have reached a total of 750,000 beneficiaries in 281 communities inside Syria, including 15 per cent in hard-to-reach and besieged areas. Despite these efforts, humanitarian needs remain extremely high, with 6.1 million internally displaced people (IDPs) inside Syria since the beginning of the crisis, including 1.4 million newly displaced in 2017.

DG Swing added that he was looking forward to welcoming Kuwait as a new Observer State at the IOM Council on 28 November. He stated that IOM wishes to replicate the Kuwait model with other States in the region in order to extend further assistance to people in need in the Middle East.

For more information, please contact Jorge Galindo, IOM HQ, Tel: +41227179205, Email: jgalindo@iom.int