Syria - 3 Years On

In March 2014, the World Food Programme (WFP) and the European Commission launched a poster campaign to raise awareness on the Syria crisis. Posters were placed around the Brussels metro system in French and Dutch.

In order to evaluate the success of this poster WFP devised a survey looking at the visibility of the poster and its impact on those who saw it, as well as assessing general public knowledge on crisis affected countries around the world.

They targeted members of the public using the Belgian metro asking them questions including: "did you know the EU was giving humanitarian funding to people inside and around Syria?"

The conclusions were interesting showing that while more than two out of three people knew the EU was providing aid for people affected by the crisis in Syria, in general they did not feel very well informed about what is happening there. When asked about other ongoing humanitarian crises, one third of them had not heard about the current crisis in the Central African Republic, and only half had heard about the current crisis in South Sudan. 

More than half felt this type of campaign is an effective way to increase people’s awareness about ongoing humanitarian emergencies.

3 years: This is not her age but the length of her life that has been dominated by the Syrian crisis