I think we can clearly define the Syria crisis and Iraq crisis both together as protection crises. They're crises that affect women and children, and men and boys. We have many protection challenges and one of them primarily is access to many of the very vulnerable people. What we know now is that in the Syrian population the numbers in need are about 12.2 million. It's huge. We also are very cognizant that there are a large number of refugees in the hosting countries, as you're aware.
The UN has recently launched its humanitarian appeals for 2015. Those appeals are the largest ever for the Syrian context. The needs there are about $7.3 billion to meet humanitarian needs for 2015, and that doesn't include roughly $2.4 billion, $2.4 billion for resilience type programming. It is the largest ever appeal for a response. The needs are great and one of the ongoing concerns is going to be to continue to access the people in northern Syria. The UN has really ramped up its cross-border activities to try to make sure they can access those people who are in the hard-to-reach areas. There's a much greater focus now on protection, particularly with regard to sexual and gender-based violence, but also on meeting the education needs of the children across the region through the No Lost Generation initiative. It's really about trying to get children into safe spaces where they can actually feel like children again. It's trying to identify and ensure that unaccompanied minors in fact are accompanied by parents, or family, or adults. It's trying to ensure that there's family reunification for those children. It's also trying to ensure psychosocial support for children who are traumatized.
I always find it very sad when our partners start to look at the generation of activities such as psychosocial support because then you know that you are in a context where it's a protracted crisis. It's not just looking at the primary needs of food, and water, and shelter. It means that you are settling into a longer crisis and the needs evolve. It's currently a very challenging context for humanitarian workers, and especially for the folks who are conflict-affected.