Seeking guidance on effective cash-based intervention

byddavies7d12th Jul 2019No comments


I'd like to tap into the community's knowledge and insights regarding cash-based interventions. The organization I work for assists vulnerable migrants in Egypt through legal, psychosocial, and educational services, and also strengthens the capacities of community-based organizations. In addition, we have historically provided emergency cash-based assistance to reduce the burden of medical and educational costs so that they can access medical treatment and their kids can attend community schools of admittedly varying quality. We want to maximize the impact of our cash-based assistance, and there's no way we can keep up with demand - in the face of growing, increasingly vulnerable populations, service providers in Egypt are experiencing budget cuts across the board. To give you an idea, UNHCR recently estimated that over 76,000 households are in poverty (around 70% of the population) and can only provide cash-based assistance to 14,000 households long-term.

There is a clear gap in cash assistance even for those who are getting it: service providers are providing emergency assistance for the first month, but then the recipient is not assisted for several months thereafter, as UNHCR has a considerable lag (estimated at 3-6 months) in putting people on long-term support. This interim period seems like a promising place for us to start, but even then we would need to narrow our criteria down as we cannot support all who need it.

I'd greatly appreciate it if someone could point me towards realistic standards or guidelines that we could use to shape our approach to cash-based assistance. Note that I'm somewhat familiar with DALYs and concerns surrounding their reliability, and the Sphere standards are unfortunately not realistic in the current funding environment. Any help would be much appreciated. Thanks, Daniel