ReliefWeb

Overview

The ASAL Humanitarian Network's (AHN) humanitarian assistance programme provides three rounds of multipurpose cash transfers (MPCTs) to vulnerable populations in drought-affected counties in arid and semi-arid counties of Kenya. This assessment looks at a supplementary set of beneficiary households in Turkana county added to the main lot of beneficiary households under the AHN's main programme. This response in Turkana county is primarily funded by Oxfam and is implemented by SAPCONE; a local non-governmental organisation (NGO). The AHN is distributing three rounds of MPCTs between December 2021 and March 2022, to selected beneficiary households across Turkana county in Kenya.

To monitor the ongoing impact of the MPCTs on the beneficiary population, IMPACT Initiatives provides impartial third-party monitoring and evaluation. IMPACT conducted a baseline assessment prior to the first round of transfers, a midline assessment after the first round, and an endline assessment after the last round of transfers. This factsheet presents key findings from the endline assessment in Turkana county as well as comparison of some key indicators from the baseline assessment. The figures in grey highlight the magnitude of change from the baseline to the endline for relevant indicators.

Methodology

A total of 205 households received three rounds of MPCA between December 2021 and March 2022. IMPACT interviewed beneficiary households two weeks after the last round of cash transfers. A total of 144 beneficiary household interviews were conducted.

The interviewed beneficiary households were selected through a simple random sampling approach at the county level, rendering findings that are representative at the county level with a 95% confidence level and a 5% margin of error. A buffer of 10% was introduced to off-set expected difficulties in reaching the sample size in the follow-up assessments. All results presented have been aggregated by the proportion of AHN beneficiary households.

Challenges & Limitations:

• Data on household expenditure was based on a 30-day recall period; a considerably long duration over which to expect households to remember expenditures accurately.
  This might have negatively impacted the accuracy of reporting on the expenditure indicators.

• Daily data checking and coverage tracking was affected by poor internet connection in some areas, which made it difficult to follow-up with the enumerators engaged in the field.

Key findings

• Findings from the baseline assessment indicate that 95.0% of households had a poor Food Consumption Score (FCS) and only around 1.0% had an acceptable FCS. Following the three rounds of cash transfers, only 38.2% of households had a poor FCS during the endline assessment whereas 16.7% of households had an acceptable FCS. The improvement in FCS is likely due to the beneficiary households having received cash to supplement their income and help them in the purchase of food.

• The proportion of the households with low Household Dietary Diversity Scores (HDDS) stands at 98.6%, which is 0.9% decrease from the baseline, this indicates a continuously severe low dietary intake among HHs.

• A vast majority of households reported "almost never" having been able to meet their basic needs in the 30 days prior to endline data collection, the proportion of households reporting "never" having been able to do so decreased considerably from 94.1% at baseline to 31.3% at the endline.

• Market purchase remained the most comonly reported primary source of food (56.3%) in the 7 days prior to data collection.

• The average reported monthly income per household during the endline assessment was 10500 Kenyan shillings (KES), a 1036.4% increase from the baseline assessment (924 KES).

• In line with the increase in the average monthly income, the most commonly reported source of household income was cash transfers (45.8%) followed by fishing (31.9%). This has changed considerably from the baseline, where fishing was reported as the main source of income by 51% of the households.