Cash Barometer

Cash-based programming has been a key component of the humanitarian response in Ukraine since the escalation of the conflict into a full-scale war in February 2022. In 2022 alone, 5.6 million people were reached with multi-purpose cash assistance (MPCA), making it the largest humanitarian cash assistance programme in history.

The Cash Barometer launched in CAR in 2020 in the context of the COVID-19 pandemic, where we sought to capture the voices of market traders and CVA recipients in the context of the developing crisis. Since then, CVA significantly scaled up in CAR, making it even more critical than ever to ensure the voices of CVA recipients are heard.

Ground Truth Solutions has been tracking the experiences of aid recipients in Somalia and Somaliland since 2017. In this time, cash and voucher recipients have consistently requested more involvement and consultation from aid actors than they receive.

In late 2019, we launched the Cash Barometer in Nigeria with a survey of CVA recipients in Borno State. Following the COVID-19 pandemic, we adapted our approach to explore how CVA recipients, humanitarians, and financial service providers perceived the economic impact of the pandemic.

In collaboration with the World Food Programme (WFP), Ground Truth Solutions explored the lived experiences or user journeys of women receiving mobile money in Somalia.

In collaboration with CAMEALEON and WFP, Ground Truth Solutions explored the lived experiences or user journeys of Syrians receiving multi-purpose cash (MPC) assistance from the World Food Programme (WFP) in Lebanon.

Covid-19 has sparked an economic crisis that will disproportionately affect the most vulnerable members of society, particularly in humanitarian contexts. The Cash Barometer project explores its economic impact, helping humanitarians to better understand its various effects, as well as to what extent recipients’ perspectives inform cash and voucher assistance (CVA) responses, on two levels: global and in-country.

Humanitarian cash programming comes with inherent risks. With its increased use, organisations are rightly becoming more attuned to barriers and challenges that affected populations face. This includes abuses of power by financial service providers as well as the ability to voice complaints and share feedback.

Billions of dollars in humanitarian cash and voucher assistance (CVA) programmes are delivered annually to populations affected by conflict and natural disasters to enable them to meet their basic needs.

Humanitarian agencies today increasingly deliver cash to affected people, using a growing number of mechanisms to transfer money. From digital payment systems to more traditional methods of delivering funds, there is still much to be learned about how well these systems can meet recipients’ needs and satisfy their preferences.