Abstract
Turkey, as the country with the highest number of refugees, is currently home to 3.6 million Syrians who had to flee their country due to the conflict that started in 2011. Since December 2016, refugees from all nationalities in Turkey can apply for the Emergency Social Safety Net (ESSN), the largest humanitarian program ever funded by the European Union. ESSN is an unconditional cash transfer program that targets households using demographic criteria to select the most vulnerable among those who are forcibly displaced and, in 2021, ESSN had a total of 1.7 million beneficiaries. Two out of six of these demographic targeting criteria were directly or indirectly affected by the total number of children in the household, which were a dependency ratio equal to or greater than 1.5 (i.e., 3 children and 2 parents) and having at least 4 minor children. These criteria are questioned based on whether families were encouraged to have more children to become beneficiaries. In this research, we compare the fertility rates, fertility calendar, and birth order of children of ESSN beneficiaries and ineligible applicants by using propensity score matching. Our results show that the existence of the ESSN targeting criteria does not encourage ineligible households to have more children in order to become eligible for the ESSN. It can, however, encourage households to have children more quickly than they would otherwise.
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Data availability
The data that support the findings of this study are available from the government of Turkey, but restrictions apply to the availability of these data, which were used under license for the current study, and so are not publicly available. Data are however available from the authors upon reasonable request and with permission of World Food Programme upon their request from the government of Turkey.
Notes
Facility table on how the budget was distributed year by year can be found here: https://ec.europa.eu/neighbourhood-enlargement/sites/default/files/facility_table.pdf.
Refugees Association document on commonly known facts that are wrong about Syrians—only available in Turkish: https://www.stgm.org.tr/sites/default/files/2020-09/suriyelilerle-ilgili-dogru-bilinen-yanlislar_0.pdf.
In this case, “raw estimate” indicates an estimate prior to using the propensity score matching method.
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Acknowledgements
We would like to thank World Food Programme and Turkish Red Crescent for their generous support during our research project.
Funding
This research project was funded by the World Food Programme (WFP) Turkey Country Office during the implementation of ESSN with the cooperation of WFP and Turkish Red Crescent (TRC) in order to provide an evidence-based approach for the ESSN and for future cash-based interventions.
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IB led the project due to her knowledge in the region as a demographer and her experience with ESSN. CS-P was the main lead for analysis which were performed by LF. AA was the project supervisor.
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This study was funded by World Food Programme. The authors have no competing interests to declare that are relevant to the content of this article.
Ethical approval
In April 2019, the World Food Programme (WFP) and the Demography Research Centre of Paris Pantheon Sorbonne (CRIDUP) had contracted for the project called ‘Impact of ESSN Demographic Targeting Criteria’. This project aimed to measure the impact of targeting criteria of the Emergency Social Safety Net (A humanitarian cash transfer programme) on the fertility rates of Syrian refugees in Turkey. The quantitative data that was used for this project comes from an administrative from the government of Turkey, thus did not include any additional data collection activity that would require an ethnics approval. The data shared anonymously with the research team and was deleted after the analysis due to its sensitivity.
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Bozdag, I., Fardeau, L., Sierra-Paycha, C. et al. Can demographic targeting alter short-term fertility decisions? The effects of humanitarian assistance on the fertility behaviour of Syrian refugees in Turkey. SN Soc Sci 3, 204 (2023). https://doi.org/10.1007/s43545-023-00788-3
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s43545-023-00788-3