The project “Site-management support and Community Based Protection”, is a project in partnership and funded by the Norwegian Refugee Council from April – December 2022 to serve Ukrainian refugees and improve the way they receive help in Romania. The site-management support component of the project aims to provide service mapping, strengthen referral pathways and offer support to the other organizations that are providing direct services to refugees from Ukraine forced to flee to safety in Romania. The community-based protection part of the project aims to improve refugees’ access to services and information through direct communication and by involving their direct participation in the process.
Supporting Collaboration at the Border in Siret
The project began focused on Suceava county, as the main border with the highest percentage of crossings is Siret. At the beginning of the war, after AMURTEL conducted initial assessments, it created an instrument to facilitate the communication and cooperation between stakeholders present at the border in Siret by setting up the website siret.help. This provided an easily accessible service mapping tool. In addition, AMURTEL then created a resource section for volunteers, and facilitated the integration, and when requested, training of new volunteers at the border. The NRC project has allowed AMURTEL to continue building the website, as well as to provide equipment and furniture in order to create better working conditions for collective meetings of the NGOs present at the border and in a recently installed new integrated Info Point tent, where all of the NGOs collaborate together to offer initial information about services to newly arriving refugees.
Moving into Recovery Phase in Bucharest with a Mobile Team
AMURTEL has assessed other border points and should there be an increase in influx, it is ready to extend supportive services to those points as well. However, at this point, as the response moves away from the initial emergency phase into a recovery and integration phase, AMURTEL will be expanding its project work to Bucharest and Brasov, two of the cities in Romania with high concentrations of refugees settling down. AMURTEL has already begun conducting focus groups with refugees and discussions with other key stakeholders in order to better understand how they access information and services, in order to find ways to improve their experience. This will provide the basis for the next phase of work in Bucharest and Brasov.