Eliminating poverty in Turkey requires solutions through innovation, cooperation, and policy change. It requires all of us to work hand in hand.
We have seen the poverty rate go down in Turkey. It has more than halved between 2002 and 2015, and extreme poverty fell even faster. However, during the pandemic poverty rates have increased by as much as 2.1% to 12.2% in 2020 – equivalent to 1.6 million newly poor. Poverty entails more than the lack of income and productive resources to ensure basic human needs such as food, shelter, clean drinking water, and sanitation. Its manifestations include hunger and malnutrition, limited access to education and other basic services, social discrimination, and exclusion. TPF works with partners on the ground to deal with this multi-layered prevalent problem.
TPF’S ACTION
While progress in eradicating extreme poverty has been incremental and widespread, the persistence of poverty, including extreme poverty remains a major concern in Turkey. TPF joins the Cemre Fund to address extreme poverty and provide cash transfers and in-kind support to increase access to services such as education, health, and nutrition for all.
The Cemre Fund finds and funds organizations such as Temel Ihtiyac Dernegi (TIDER, Basic Needs Association) and provides capacity-building support to these organizations. Their impact in the last year includes:
- increasing the number of people benefiting from DYA’s network by 50 percent (from2,000 to 3,000 people monthly) by matching them with new donors, and
- supporting TIDER’s eight food banks in various cities and increasing the number of beneficiaries by 20 percent (+13,500 additional people).
We want to reach out to more people.
To that end, we are partnering with Cemre Fund to identify more families in remote places and increase food donations. The goal is to support at least 300 more families by the end of 2021 with food and other basic needs through the Mobile Food Bank in the following neighborhoods of Istanbul: Ataşehir, Çekmeköy, Ümraniye, Sancaktepe, Pendik, Şişli, Beyoğlu, Fatih, and Esenyurt.
Each $85 donation will provide food and the basic needs of a family for 10 months.
Any support will have a tremendous impact on our fight against extreme poverty in Turkey and will help us to establish a sustainable ecosystem.
JOIN US to help deliver the urgent needs of these families during these most challenging times!
