2011
First intervention in the country
7,600
People reached
28
Activities budget
1,848,603€
Activities budget
Context
Throughout 2025, Italian migration policies continued to reflect a predominantly security-oriented approach. Arrivals by sea stabilised at around 66,000 people, a figure in line with 2024 and significantly lower than the peaks of 2023. Despite this decline in numbers, pressure on the reception system and local communities has increased, highlighting a chronic lack of structured pathways for long-term integration.
The most critical areas remain the large urban suburbs and informal settlements linked to agricultural work, such as the Capitanata area in Puglia and the rural areas of Sicily. In these contexts, the crisis manifests itself through exclusion from essential services, labour exploitation and housing insecurity among a highly marginalised migrant population. The main challenges concern barriers to accessing the National Health Service, the protection of unaccompanied foreign minors, and the need to prevent and respond to gender-based violence – an area that still suffers from insufficient structural funding at national level.
Against this backdrop of growing marginalisation, the work of civil society and humanitarian organisations has become a vital safeguard to fill the gaps in the public system, ensuring social and health care and the protection of rights for those excluded from formal reception channels.
SECTORS OF INTERVENTION
INTERSOS in Italy
Throughout 2025, INTERSOS in Italy has been active in areas of social and geographical marginalisation. Its work has been based on a model that combines emergency assistance with the development of pathways to self-reliance, targeting unaccompanied foreign minors, young adults, survivors of gender-based violence and seasonal workers. In Rome, the INTERSOS24 centre in the Torre Spaccata neighbourhood has become a key point of reference for managing the most vulnerable cases, providing psychosocial support and legal guidance. Within the INTERSOS24 centre, the social clinic provided primary care and mental health support to those excluded from the national health system, whilst the CARI (Rome Immigrant Reception Centres) “Casa INTERSOS” centre continued to provide residential accommodation and ongoing specialist care to Ukrainian refugee families with serious health vulnerabilities.
Our commitment to inclusion has extended to the education and housing sectors. In the capital, we have strengthened training programmes for young people leaving care, collaborating with the Provincial Centres for Adult Education (CPIA) and also working within prisons to prevent early school leaving. In southern Italy, between Puglia and Sicily, our mobile clinics have reached the most isolated areas, bringing medical screenings and psychological support directly to the informal settlements inhabited by agricultural labourers, who are often victims of severe exploitation.
In Turin, the foster care project for unaccompanied foreign minors and young adults provided an effective alternative to institutional care, facilitating the placement of minors with relatives or members of their own national community. This model not only improved the well-being of the young people, facilitating access to school and healthcare services, but also ensured greater sustainability of the care system. Finally, at a national level, the VOC (Community Outreach Volunteers) project, in partnership with UNHCR, has transformed members of migrant and refugee communities into active agents of protection: through a network of trained volunteers, we have facilitated access to rights for hundreds of people, overcoming the linguistic and cultural barriers that often prevent the most vulnerable from seeking help.
