Highlights
From January to March 2015, WFP assisted 896,791 Syrian refugees, 11,972 new arrivals and 21,801 Palestine refugees from Syria.
As of March 2015, WFP contracted 410 shops across Lebanon and injected over US$444 million into the Lebanese economy through its voucher programme. Due to limited resources, since January 2015 WFP’s monthly voucher value has been reduced by 30 percent, from US$27 to US$19 per person.
During the first quarter of 2015, food consumption levels of refugee households were slightly deteriorated compared to the previous quarter, with 72 percent of households reporting acceptable food consumption scores following WFP assistance. This still represents an improvement when compared to the 56 percent of households with acceptable food consumption scores among pre-assistance baseline (PAB) group.
With reduction in voucher value, sale of household goods increased significantly with more households reducing expenditure on education or health and spending their savings to buy food.
As observed in the previous quarter, households in the Beirut, Mount Lebanon and South Lebanon region had higher levels of food consumption than households in North Lebanon and the Bekaa.