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Ukraine: Research Terms of Reference - Joint Market Monitoring Initiative UKR2203 (March 2022, V1)

Países
Ucrania
Fuentes
REACH
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2. Rationale

2.1 Background

On 24 February, after weeks and months of military build-up at the border and heightened tensions, Russia has started a full-scale invasion in Ukraine, with rocket strikes hitting targets throughout the country and its ground forces advancing from the north, east, and south. Major attacks have been reported across Ukraine, including in the capital, Kyiv, causing civilians to flee into shelters and subways as air raid sirens rang out in the streets of the capital. Russian troops have quickly reached several main cities that are close to the border, bringing military clashes to these cities. Chernihiv (north), Sumy (north), Kharkiv (north-east), Kherson (south), Mariupol (south-east), Mykolaiv (south), Odesa (south-west), among other cities in northern, eastern and southern parts of the country, including Donetska and Luhanska oblasts, suffered from ongoing military fights with reported civilian casualties from the very first days.

Ground military clashes, rocket strikes, shelling and bombings in these densely populated urban settlements have caused major displacement flows with more than 1 million people moving towards safer areas in the center and west of the country and more than 2 million people fleeing the country.

Reported critical infrastructure destructions, active military clashes in settlements, large scale displacement contribute to the worsening of the humanitarian situation in the country. People that remain blocked in cities encircled by the militaries, and internally displaced people who have reached safe havens are in humanitarian need. Different challenges related to each of the groups are complicating organisation of the response. Access to affected communities remains severely restricted, while the constantly deteriorating security situation prevents the possibility of evacuation in many locations, leading to the accumulation and exacerbation of unmet needs. Many settlements that host displaced people are reportedly facing problems with their capacity to absorb incoming flows of internally displaced people at such scales.

2.1 Intended impact

Humanitarian agencies have urgently intensified their work in the country in order to organise and provide necessary response of the relevant scale. It was agreed by the Humanitarian Country Team (HCT) that multi-purpose cash (MPC) is going to be the main modality of the response. The Cash Working Group (CWG), co-led by OCHA and ACTED, has established four task teams to assess and plan the cash-based response. These teams are focusing on targeting (led by WFP), transfer mechanisms (led by Norwegian Refugee Council, NRC), deduplication and registration (led by UNHCR) and monitoring (led by ACTED). REACH is engaged as a technical partner in all four task teams of the CWG and is fully involved in the development and implementation of the Joint Market Monitoring Initiative (JMMI) tools in Ukraine.

Given the current conditions of mass displacement and active military clashes in urban centers, as well as the importance of MPC in the response in Ukraine, market monitoring is key for the humanitarian intervention. Due to the conflict's sudden expansion to areas of Ukraine that were previously untouched, usable humanitarian market data in areas of partner intervention is highly limited and incomplete. The JMMI seeks to fill this information gap by providing useful and timely data on trends in Ukrainian market prices which will enable the Cash Working Group to continually revise its standard MPC transfer values to reflect developments in the humanitarian situation.