INTRODUCTION AND RATIONALE
The increased use of cash grants as part of humanitarian response has led to the development of a number of tools and approaches by various agencies to best decide what needs the cash transfer is intended to meet. This is based on good programming practice and setting clear objectives for the assistance provided and then deciding on what in-kind, cash and mixed modalities are most appropriate and feasible. Recent years have seen an increased number of actors involved, more coordination discussions around the value of cash grants, and discussion on multipurpose/unconditional cash grants as a first response to meet immediate, basic needs.
There is increased awareness and use of the Minimum Expenditure Basket (MEB) as a methodology for estimating household level needs in humanitarian contexts based on experiences from Somalia, Lebanon and Iraq that have now been extended to a variety of new contexts such as the Nepal earthquake response and the response to insecurity in northern and central Nigeria.
Protracted humanitarian crises, despite their volatility and access limitations, are contexts in which a lot of information has been generated to support decisionmaking around responses. These contexts have provided an opportunity to test new approaches to cash transfer programming (CTP), analysis of trend data and meeting needs that change over time. The most protracted of these tend to be refugee contexts where access to the population is not necessarily an issue, but evolving needs over time and enhanced data collection systems have refined CTP responses.
In areas with significant access challenges, CTP has great potential to provide appropriate support to the most vulnerable. However, the risks linked to CTP are often heightened, or perceived to be heightened, in remote access contexts and are proving challenging for humanitarian organisations in a number of remotely managed contexts.
The Norwegian Refugee Council (NRC) has been funded by the European Commission Humanitarian Aid and Civil Protection Department (ECHO) to explore and address the key risks involved in implementing CTP in remote access environments and to develop and share redefined and simplified tools and project guidance, and create and share training materials.
One area of exploration and development of this project is the determination of the size of support a household receives. In a remotely managed project in a hard to access area it is more difficult to undertake detailed household and market assessments. This results in the use of more assumptions and a less robust data set.