North West Syria rapid market monitoring: cash-based responses technical working group, snapshot

To inform humanitarian cash programming, REACH conducted a Rapid Market Monitoring (RMM) of 20 major markets in northwest Syria (NWS), in response to the rapidly depreciating Syrian Pound (SYP) against the US Dollar (USD) and reports of fuel types being unavailable.

The 20 markets were selected based on recommendations by REACH Team Leaders, who prioritised markets witnessing significant price increases, as well as markets reportedly supplying key commodities to a large number of communities. This RMM assessed the availability and prices of the 18 items that comprise the Survival Minimum Expenditure Basket (SMEB; for SMEB components, please see our regular monthly Market Monitoring Exercise(MM)), which represents the minimum, culturally adjusted items required to support a 6-person household for a month. The commodities are typically sold in markets and consumed by average Syrian households. Items include fresh food and bulk food, non-food items (NFIs), water, fuel, and cell phone data. For this RMM, enumerators attempted to collect three minimum price points per item per market.

The data for this RMM exercise was collected by REACH on 1 March 2020.

Data collection was conducted both remotely and directly through market vendor key informants (KIs) in markets which are usually covered by the MM. Comparisons were made to the February MM for Northwest Syria (Data collection 10-17 February). Findings should only be considered as indicative of the current prices and reported unavailability of items in the assessed markets as reported by market vendor KIs. The RMM dataset is available on the REACH Resource Centre.