Türkiye Earthquake 2023
2023-09 Factsheet - Türkiye Earthquake 2023
Highlights
FACTSHEET JULY-SEPTEMBER 2023
By March, one month after the earthquake, there were 2.6 million displaced individuals living in tents in the EQ-affected provinces. Following the national elections in Turkiye at the end of May, there were large-scale relocations by government authorities leading to closure of tent sites and clusters, especially in urban centres. There was lack of clarity in the government's response plans. The levels of uncertainty were a barrier in having a clear response plan because it was unclear where people would be transferred to.
In the period between July to September, there was a large shift from tents as the primary temporary shelter typology to containers. At the same time, the quality of containers were not to the same standard across the response. The formal container cities comprised of AFAD-standard containers, but in this period there was an emergence of foldable containers, which were smaller in size than the AFAD-standard containers and without partitions. A large number of EQ-affected households living in rural areas were provided foldable containers and large sites with such containers were planned in Adiyaman and Hatay in this period to host refugees relocated from informal settlements.
NFI
Shelter
Need analysis
- IOM's Displacement Tracking Matrix (DTM) carried out a neighbourhood site mapping assessment in August 2023, which found a significant decrease of households in informal temporary settlements by 64% from March (more than 279,000 households) to August 2023 (more than 100,000 HHs).
- The main shelter typology in informal settlements across the four most-affected provinces (Adiyaman, Kahramanmaras, Hatay, and Malatya) were tents (66%), followed by containers (25%) and makeshift shelters (9%).
- Privacy in the tents was found to be a concern as over 60% neighbourhoods reported none or only some tents had a internal partition. In addition, one of the big needs during this period was for shading kits, as over three quarters of the neighbourhoods reported that the none or some of the tents had shading devices.
- 90% of the informal shelters were found to be "scattered" in clusters of less than ten shelters. This required shelter actors to move from a site-approach to a neighbourhood approach to assist the shelter needs of EQ-affected households displaced in temporary and precarious shelters.
- July onwards saw the emergence of "foldable containers" as temporary shelters provided by authorities in rural areas. Large foldable container sites were set up in this period in Hatay (Uzumdali) and Adiyaman (Former Adiyaman TAC) to host EQ-affected refugees relocated from informal settlements.
Response
- In the early stages of the response, based on mapping of scope and eligibility criteria of ongoing and planned government assistance, the Shelter Sector developed a strategy to guide the humanitarian shelter sector in complementing and enhancing the government response efforts – relief to recovery pathways and intervention options for assistance.
- Amid the relocations between July to September, Shelter Sector worked closely with Protection and TSS Sectors and drafted relocation updates to highlight the pressing needs of vulnerable groups evicted from informal settlements. Shelter Sector encouraged partners to continue provision of essential household items based on rapid assessments to EQ-affected households, even amid relocations and in coordination with authorities.
- In parallel, Shelter Sector partners provided shading devices to households in tents and containers. In addition, Shelter TWG worked on developing solutions to upgrade foldable containers to improve livability for the approaching winter. In this period, Shelter Sector continued to host the Light-Repairs TWG.
- From August onwards, Shelter sector has contributed to the intersectoral winterization strategy and worked on a sectoral winterization strategy, outlining the diverse shelter and household items needs, in particular the needs of the of the most vulnerable households hosted in precarious temporary shelters. The winterization support proposed by the Shelter Sector Türkiye aims to improve livability during the winter months and in the process also increase the shelter resilience beyond the winter (where households are expected to remain in the temporary shelters for a longer period).
Gaps / challenges
- With the government's large-scale shift towards decongesting informal sites, the humanitarian community faced challenges to access some of the informal settlement sites to assist households in needs of shelter and household items.
- This period saw large sites being set up to host refugees in precarious foldable containers in Hatay and Adiyaman. However, there were challenges in accessing the sites to support the authorities with site planning and/or foldable container upgrade.
- There continued to remain a lack of clarity regarding Government support packages and services available to different groups, especially to EQ-affected households in rural areas and to refugees.
