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Tracking cash and voucher assistance

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Niklas Rieger

Summary

The commitment of the humanitarian community to increase its use of cash and voucher assistance (CVA) is seen as a success story of the Grand Bargain.[1] Progress has also been made through the Grand Bargain 2.0 in endorsing a new cash coordination model.[2] However, the most recent independent Grand Bargain monitoring report pointed out that the ‘tracking of the funding for CVA is still not optimal’.[3] Effective coordination of humanitarian CVA under the new model is hindered by a lack of timely and disaggregated data on where, by whom, how and for what CVA is used. This research therefore seeks to answer three main questions on the tracking of humanitarian CVA:

  1. What does the most recent, publicly available data on CVA tell us about its use in humanitarian crisis responses?
  2. How is data on CVA currently reported and made accessible through interagency reporting platforms?
  3. How can reporting of CVA be improved?

Firstly, the report analyses the global volume of humanitarian CVA, finding that it has increased in 2021, for the sixth consecutive year, to US$5.4 billion in transfers to recipients, but that the pace of growth has slowed. These global volumes do not include most cash transfers provided through government-led social protection systems in response to crises, though a clearer picture on this assistance is emerging in some contexts. UN agencies continued to be the largest implementers of CVA that year at 61% of the global total volume, followed by NGOs and the Red Cross and Red Crescent (RCRC) Movement at 22% and 18% respectively. Three quarters of CVA transfers to recipients globally in 2021 were in the form of cash, up from 69% in 2017, and one quarter as vouchers, with early 2022 data indicating that a further shift towards cash is underway.

The relative importance of CVA within overall humanitarian responses differs between crisis settings based on data from humanitarian response planning in 2022. The large multi-purpose cash response in Ukraine in 2022 is likely to drive a continued increase in global volumes of CVA. The share of CVA activities within five out of six clusters (with that share being at least 10%) across 18 response plans also increased between 2021 and 2022. Meanwhile project data from humanitarian response plans provides evidence for the concentration of humanitarian CVA with international, rather than local and national, agencies. International agencies accounted for 97% of requirements for CVA activities in 2022. Within those response plans, CVA projects are more likely to receive funding than other projects, but this trend is much more pronounced for international actors than it is for local and national actors. Project and funding data on 2021 shows that projects with CVA components by international actors were more than twice as likely as other projects to be funded. In comparison local and national NGOs (LNNGOs) were only 7% more likely to receive funding for their CVA projects than for their other projects that year. This raises the question of to what extent there exists a tension between the commitments to increase the use of CVA and to localise humanitarian funding.

Secondly, the report examines the data availability on humanitarian CVA. It evaluates interagency reporting at the global and response level against the minimum reporting requirements agreed by the Grand Bargain cash workstream in 2020. The criteria are whether CVA data is available on transfer values, disaggregated by cash and vouchers and whether it shows sectoral objectives. The largest volume of comparable, public data is available on the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA)’s Projects Module. It provides granular data on the planned size of CVA project components for projectised response plans, which reflect around a third of the humanitarian system. It is possible to match funding with project data, but this might be inaccurate if changes in the context required implementation of CVA to deviate from project plans. The International Aid Transparency Initiative (IATI) standard has the technical capabilities in place to fulfil all the minimum reporting requirements on CVA, but to date very little data has been published. More granular data on CVA is often available at the response level through efforts by cash working groups, though rarely in real time or with access to the underlying data. There also seems to be a missing link that brings together at the global level comparable data from these country-specific monitoring efforts.

To that end the report proposes the following key recommendations to improve the public data landscape on humanitarian CVA and thereby facilitate more effective coordination:

  • The global Cash Advisory Group should agree on who is responsible for tracking CVA within the new cash coordination model. Data should be captured in line with the agreed minimum reporting requirements and regularly be incorporated into global, interagency reporting systems.
  • Humanitarian agencies that participate in projectised response plans should ensure accurate and up-to-date information on CVA components of their projects are reported to the Projects Module and that all received funding is reported with project information.
  • Organisations implementing CVA and publishing data to IATI should report on CVA transfer values as expenditure under their activities.

Read the full report.