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The U.N. and its local partners are creating jobs and trying to keep basic services going in conflict-torn Syria
Alongside this week’s delicate negotiations on monitoring Syria's wobbly ceasefire and fresh appeals for more than $8 billion to meet the needs of conflict-hit Syrians, the United Nations has also been talking about ways to help the country get back on its feet fast once the war ends.
A lot is already happening inside Syria to create employment and keep basic services going despite the chaos, and doing this hand in hand with local groups and businesses is key to helping the country recover in peacetime, Helen Clark, the head of the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP), told a major conference on Syria on Monday.
In the past year, 29,000 jobs have been created in nine governorates - including for women-headed households and disabled people - in areas like waste management and the production of food, clothing and other emergency aid goods.
And in hard-hit cities such as Homs and Aleppo, some 56,000 tonnes of debris and 212,000 tonnes of rubbish and other solid waste have been removed, Clark said.
"Many opportunities exist to support Syrians to build or rebuild livelihoods, access basic services, and have hope for the future," she told the meeting in Helsinki. "This approach... seeks to build the capacities of people, communities and institutions in ways which will also contribute to longer-term recovery when that is possible."
Little is reported in the media about the more positive projects that are happening in Syria - but Izumi Nakamitsu, leader of UNDP's crisis response unit, says those efforts are vital to prevent things from deteriorating even further amid the bombs and bullets.
"If basic services are completely destroyed, then when there is a (peace) agreement, we have to start from minus," she told the Thomson Reuters Foundation. "We are trying to protect them."
The work is painstaking and politically sensitive, requiring close co-operation with local communities and authorities, she added. The goal after the war ends is to get things back up and running faster.
Syria is estimated to have lost more than three decades of human development progress during six years of war, sliding from a ranking of "medium" development in 2010, down to the bottom 10 percent of countries in a global ranking by 2015, Clark said.
Given the massive need to make up those losses, U.N. agencies are now completing a process to identify what they will do in the event of a political agreement to end the conflict, Clark said.
URBAN REFUGEES
Syria's war, now close to entering its seventh year, has brought not only huge challenges in reaching the 13.5 million people requiring assistance inside the country. It has also sent around 4.9 million people fleeing into neighbouring countries - creating an acute need to help societies cope better with growing inflows of refugees, say humanitarian experts.
"2015 was the year that the crisis blew onto the public consciousness; 2016 was the year when it became clear that it wasn't going away; 2017 needs to be the year when the world takes significant steps to tackle the crisis at source and at symptom," said David Miliband, president of the International Rescue Committee.
The humanitarian sector and politicians must develop an effective aid system that can deal with long-term displacement in urban areas in poor countries, as is the situation facing many Syrians, he added in an interview.
That work has begun with efforts by the World Bank and others to provide jobs and education for Syrian refugees in host nations such as Jordan, and the spreading use of aid in the form of cash payments which help support local economies. But reality has moved faster than reforms to humanitarian practices, Miliband added.
There is also a huge backlog of asylum seekers in Europe that needs to be addressed by finding new options for resettling refugees, he noted.
But as the world experiences a surge in political populism, fuelled in part by concerns over rising migration around the globe, governments have been reluctant to make firm commitments to take in more refugees.
They have given themselves until 2018 to come up with new global compacts on refugees and migration. Those are likely to be voluntary in nature, but as the movement of people driven by political instability and poverty shows little sign of letting up, it's clear that more robust ways of responding are required, experts say.
"The best argument is that, if you don't go and solve this problem, then the problem will come to you," said Miliband.
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