Socio-medical guidance and cultural mediation for vulnerable people.

EMERGENCY has been working in Italy’s southern Calabria region since 2011, providing assistance to agricultural workers in the Gioia Tauro plain.

Currently active in the informal tent city of San Ferdinando – a “non-place” characterised by extremely precarious living conditions – our staff visit twice a week to provide socio-medical guidance and linguistic and cultural mediation. When necessary, our mobile unit accompanies people to local facilities to help them access services.

The tent city of San Ferdinando

The tent city of San Ferdinando, located on the outskirts of a municipality in the province of Reggio Calabria, was established as an institutional settlement in 2017 to provide an emergency response to the housing crisis in the area.

With conditions deteriorating, it was dismantled in 2019 and has become an informal settlement since 2021.

The people who lived there before and those who began to settle there afterwards have not received a structural housing solution, finding themselves living in an overcrowded environment that is unable to meet even basic needs.

As a result, many agricultural labourers went to live in abandoned farmhouses along the Gioia Tauro Plain, while others left permanently.

The pandemic and the subsequent crisis in the agricultural sector have further exacerbated the situation, as well as the unfavourable conditions for providing social services.

During the peak harvest season, the population reaches 500 people, who come from all over Italy. Shacks and tents do not offer sufficient protection from the cold, heat and rain.

There is often a lack of drinking water, adequate sanitation and stable electricity, while isolation and insecurity make daily life difficult and unsafe.

"The settlement is increasingly neglected. Quality of life is poor, and sanitary conditions are steadily deteriorating. People turn to us not only for social and health reasons, but also because they often do not know their rights. They do not know what they are entitled to, either from a health or a bureaucratic point of view. We try to guide them and help them access local services."
Mauro Destefano, EMERGENCY's Project Coordinator in Calabria

Who we assist

We assist agricultural labourers employed in seasonal harvesting, mainly of oranges and kiwis. They come mainly from sub-Saharan Africa and work in the fields of the Gioia Tauro plain, often with irregular or undeclared contracts.

Many of them need not only healthcare support, but also administrative and social guidance.

Most are living in conditions of severe hardship and marginalisation.

2013-2025: the Polistena Clinic and the Polibus

From 2013 to 2025, we worked in a permanent clinic based in Polistena in a building confiscated from the ‘Ndrangheta – a Calabrian Mafia group – to provide free healthcare, socio-medical guidance and psychological support to vulnerable people who were unable to access treatment.

In parallel, in 2022 we began operating the Polibus, one of EMERGENCY’s mobile clinics, between Rosarno and San Ferdinando, to safeguard the right to health in a local context marked by administrative complexities and bureaucratic, linguistic and economic barriers that often make access to treatment difficult.

In 2025, following changes in the local context and increasing residential sprawl, we reorganised our activities in Calabria to respond more effectively to the new vulnerabilities and critical issues emerging in the area.

View the Project in Italian

This project is supported with 8×1000 funds from the Italian Buddhist Institute Soka Gakkai