Cash Vouchers

2023 Participant Based Survey: Titukulane Project – PaBS Outcome Report

Despite decades of robust government and donor investments in livelihoods, food security, nutrition, and resilience, over 50% of the population lives below the poverty line. Previous activities have not sufficiently reduced the number of chronically food and nutrition insecure households nor effectively enhanced the capacity of local and government structures to implement resilience focused policies and actions. To address these issues, the Government of Malawi developed a National Resilience Strategy 2018-2030 (NRS) to guide investments in agriculture, reduce impacts and improve recovery from shocks, promote household resilience, strengthen the management of Malawi’s natural resources, and facilitate effective coordination between government institutions, civil society organizations and development partners. CARE and consortium partners designed the Titukulane Resilience Food Security Activity (RFSA) which means “let us work together for development” in the local Chichewa language—to support pilot implementation of NRS in Zomba and mangochi districts. The Titukulane RFSA, implemented by CARE International in Malawi (CIM), aims to achieve sustainable, equitable, and resilient food and nutrition security for ultra-poor and chronically vulnerable households. Specifically, Titukulane is designed to increase households’ abilities to deal with shocks without experiencing food insecurity following a three-purpose approach:

1. Increased diversified, sustainable, and equitable incomes for ultra-poor, chronically vulnerable households, women, and youth.
2. Improved nutritional status among children under 5 years of age, adolescent girls, and women of reproductive age.
3. Increased institutional and local capacities to reduce risk and increase resilience among poor and very poor households in alignment with the Malawi NRS.

To meet these three purposes, the Titukulane RFSA provides households with a package of interventions, including: Care Groups with Nutritional Cash Transfers (NCT), Farmer Field Business Schools and crop marketing support, Village Savings and Loan Associations, Adolescent nutrition, Irrigation farming, Youth vocational training including start-up capital and Gender dialogues. Read More...

The Impact of Integrating Cash Assistance into Gender-Based Violence Response in Northwest Syria

Traditionally, refugees and internally displaced persons (IDPs) have received aid in the form of in-kind assistance. Increasingly, however, cash and voucher assistance (CVA) is being used in humanitarian response to meet the diverse needs of those displaced by crisis and conflict. Preliminary findings by the Women’s Refugee Commission (WRC) indicate that CVA supports gender-based violence (GBV) prevention and response activities, yet humanitarian GBV programming does not comprehensively or consistently consider using CVA. This is a critical gap, as a refugee, internally displaced, and migrant women and girls face multiple risks and incidents of GBV before, during, and after crises. Read More...

Integrated Cash and Gender-Based Violence Programming for IPV Survivors in Guayaquil, Ecuador

Migrant and refugee women and girls are vulnerable to a range of risks before, during, and after humanitarian crises. Intimate partner violence (IPV), a type of gender-based violence (GBV), is among the many protection-specific risks
they face. Traditionally, refugees and internally displaced persons have received aid in the form of in-kind assistance, such as food and blankets. Increasingly, cash and voucher assistance (CVA) is being used in humanitarian response to meet the diverse needs of those displaced by crisis and conflict, enhancing recipients’ autonomy over what they use the funds for. Read More...

An Operational Learning Brief on Integrating Cash Assistance into Gender-Based Violence Programming in Ocaña, Colombia

With the deterioration of the economic and political situation in Venezuela, a humanitarian crisis has spilled into 16 countries across Latin America and the Caribbean, including Colombia. Colombia hosts 2.4 million Venezuelans as at
2021. Internal displacement and confinement escalated in 2019, due to a variety of armed non-state actors competing for income from narcotrafficking, human trafficking, and illegal mining.2 Despite being increasingly overshadowed by the Venezuelan migration crisis, the preexisting internal conflict in Colombia has ensured that the country has the second-largest number of internally displaced persons in the world (after Afghanistan), with an estimated 9.2 million people experiencing protracted displacement. Read More...

URBAN FOOD SECURITY & RESILIENCE BUILDING PILOT PROJECT

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Multi-Purpose Cash Assistance (MPCA) Post-Distribution Monitoring Report

CARE implement an emergency funding funded by Humanitarian Response in Afghanistan ERPF –CARE International to respond to urgent humanitarian crisis including drought, displacement, conflict and COVID through provision of MPCA and NFI. CARE distributed cash to 522 households of which 75% were female-headed, in Kabul and in Kandahar. The activity directly assisted around 3660 people in the two provinces of Kabul and Kandahar. The distribution was done directly to the registered beneficiaries from CARE’s team female and male staff. The distribution went on smoothly without any interruptions.
CARE conducted a need assessment prior to provide cash assistance in the target areas to identify most vulnerable female headed households and disabled male headed household for this assistance.
In second week of November 2021, CARE’s Program Quality Unit (PQ) conducted a Post Distribution Monitoring (PDM) – on a randomly selected beneficiary to ascertain area including but limited to cash receipt, cash utilization, decision level for cash expenditure and assess monitoring and accountability measures – satisfaction levels from the response. Read More...

Final Report for the Final Evaluation of OFDA Response program

This report presents the final evaluation of the United States’ Agency for International Development (Office of Foreign Disaster Assistance ( Response Program implemented by CARE Turkey and its partners in Aleppo and Idleb governorates of Northwest Syria. The evaluation aimed to assess the program’s relevance, efficiency, effectiveness, impact, sustainability and coordination using the Organization for Economic Co operation and Development's Development Assistance Committee (OECD DAC) evaluation criteria and was carried out from July to October 2021.

“I am very satisfied with this assistance in terms of gravelling the road, providing the camp with water and upgrading the tents for the entire camp. All of those interventions were desperately needed. People are satisfied because the situation has improved within the camp.”
-Camp Manager
“I can say that this service is very important in all aspects because it is securing clean and safe water for the neighborhood (…). Everyone in the neighborhood is satisfied with the services.”
-FGD participant Read More...

Lesson Learned from the use of Cash plus in the support of Agricultural and Fishery inputs in Khanfar, Sarar and Rusad districts in Abyan Governorate

The seed security and fishery sector production inputs are largely affected in Yemen as a result of prolonged conflict in the country. The lack of access to these critical agricultural inputs has been attributed to the heavily weakened purchasing power. In response, CARE Yemen through Yemen Humanitarian Fund provided support to 2500 most vulnerable and food in-secured farming and fishing households with cluster-approved cereal/vegetable seeds, farm tools and fishing kits in Khanfar, Sarar and Rusad districts in Abyan Governorate. The same households receiving the production inputs were also provided with cash aid of 50$ per month for 3 months. The cash aid also known as Cash plus was utilized by the farmers and the fisherfolk to bridge the food gap faced before a harvest. Read More...

Cost-efficiency analysis Conditional Cash for Education and Protection

This case study summarizes an analysis conducted by CARE using the Dioptra tool to generate cost-efficiency estimates for Conditional Cash for Education and Protection in Jordan. The analysis revealed that:
● Conditional Cash for Education and Protection cost $1,474 per child on average, across nine projects within the program portfolio.
● Tweaking the transfer size and frequency can affect cost-efficiency by more than 30 percent. It can free up funds to reach at least 40 percent more children with conditional cash, or allow existing recipient households to benefit from other economic resilience interventions.
● Providing awareness sessions on the importance of education is a small cost component of conditional cash that could be cost-effective.
● Different interventions are required for different groups of children. At minimum, the children receiving conditional cash should be differentiated by age: young (6-11) and old (12-16).
● Providing conditional cash for the full school year of at least 10 months is believed to be more effective and protective for children in need.
● Despite its effectiveness, cash incentives are unlikely to be a sustainable intervention to ensure children’s school attendance. It could benefit from other supporting interventions that address social barriers preventing children from attending school.
● Based on further assessments on different approaches and best practices, the program team intends to test a gradual reduction in transfer amounts for 10 months per year over 3 years, differentiated by age group, including livelihoods support for all recipient households, and referrals to Emergency Cash Assistance for highly vulnerable households.
Cost-efficiency estimates are cited for learning purposes only, and should not be used as the sole basis for future budgeting or benchmarking. All cost-efficiency estimates include Direct Project Costs, Direct Shared Costs, and Indirect Costs. Read More...

CASH AND VOUCHER ASSISTANCE IN RESPONSE TO THE COVID-19 PANDEMIC

In April 2020, CARE received a five million dollar grant from MARS to implement a multi-country program, including Cote d’Ivoire, Ecuador, Ghana, Guatemala, Haiti, Honduras, India, Peru, Thailand, and Venezuela1, with the aim of reducing the negative impacts of COVID-19 on vulnerable populations, especially women and girls, using complementary and multimodal approaches. A key activity of this program was the provision of cash and voucher assistance (CVA) to vulnerable populations to meet their diverse basic needs. Program data indicated that CVA was implemented in Cote d’Ivoire, Ecuador, Ghana, Guatemala, Haiti, Honduras, and Thailand. Monitoring data from different countries showed that CVA was unconditional; with cash modality representing 95% of transfers. Key targets populations for CVA activities vary by country and include: vulnerable households (Cote d’Ivoire, and Haiti); migrants and refugees (Honduras, Ecuador, and Thailand); domestic workers (Guatemala and Ecuador); survivors of GBV and other forms of violence against women (Guatemala and Ecuador); and lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, intersex, and queer/questioning (LGBTQI+) individuals (Ecuador). Across all projects (or countries), participants reported numerous uses of CVA including purchase foods stuff, payment of health services, hygiene services, rental/housing, savings and livelihoods activities.
Given the nature and scale of this program as well as its organizational commitment to learning, CARE was keen to understand the extent to which the project supported and protected vulnerable populations against the loss or disruption of their livelihoods in a gender sensitive manner. The study seeks to provide open-source learnings for peer
companies and agencies on how CVA was utilized in this program with two major questions: (i) How gender sensitive was the process for CARE’s CVA? (ii) How gender sensitive was the intended outcome of CARE’s CVA?
This documentation report compiles lessons from across the projects implemented in the targeted countries and draws from the diversity of their experiences to provide some recommendations on more gender sensitive CVA in the future. Read More...

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