The EU has allocated €209 million in additional emergency humanitarian aid to support projects to help improve the lives of refugees in Greece and assure them greater independence, the European Commission announced on Thursday 27 July.
The projects include the Emergency Support to Integration & Accommodation (ESTIA) programme, which has a budget of €151 million. ESTIA will help refugees and their families rent urban accommodation and provide them with cash assistance, affording them greater dignity in meeting their basic needs. Herein lies a change from previous humanitarian projects, which have mainly provided support for accommodation in camps and delivered direct supplies.
Two ESTIA contracts concluded with the United Nations Refugee Agency (UNHCR) were announced by the Commission and the UNHCR in Greece, during a visit by European Humanitarian Aid and Crisis Response Commissioner Christos Stylianides and his colleague at Migration, Dimitris Avramopoulos, to the country.
“The aim of these new projects is to get refugees out of the camps and into everyday accommodation and help them have more secure and normal lives”, said Stylianides.
A €93.5 million project will provide accommodation in towns for 22,000 people. It will increase the number of refugees living in rented apartments in Greece up to 30,000 by the end of 2017. Some 2,000 rented accommodation places will be located on the Greek islands, with the bulk of apartments rented in cities and towns on mainland Greece. A number of municipalities in Greece are also formally part of this large-scale project.
A further €57.6 million project will set up a basic social safety net for all asylum seekers and refugees in Greece by providing them with pre-defined monthly cash allocations through a dedicated card. Using this card, refugees will be able to meet their basic needs such as food, medicine and public transport.
The remaining funding of some €58 million will go to humanitarian NGOs to top up existing projects addressing pressing humanitarian needs in Greece, including shelter, primary health care, psycho-social support, improved hygiene conditions as well as informal education.
The new emergency assistance will be provided by EURO ECHO, an instrument which funds humanitarian aid to vulnerable persons within the member states of the EU facing disasters or exceptional crises with wide-scale humanitarian consequences – with Greece at the top of the list. (Original version in French by Aminata Niang)