Mapping the user journeys of cash recipients in Ukraine
Photo: Mikhail Volkov
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. Thousands more are being reached by other types of cash transfers from humanitarian organisations and through the government's social protection system.
Ground Truth Solutions, in collaboration with the Collaborative Cash Delivery Network (CCD) and funded by the Disasters Emergency Committee (DEC), began an 18-month project in January 2023 with the aim of documenting aid applicants' and recipients' experiences of humanitarian cash transfer programmes and government-led social protection programmes. The project also aims to collaboratively develop and facilitate the implementation of recommendations by aid providers to enable a process of real-time learning from recipients' experience and feedback.
We will be conducting three rounds of qualitative interviews with aid applicants and recipients, with the support of our local data collection partner Open Space Works Cooperative. In the first round of interviews, we will speak to a variety of people in focus group discussions and in-depth interviews to understand the broad range of experiences with cash assistance in Ukraine and the vulnerability factors that shape it. This will allow us to narrow our focus for the second and third rounds, where we will be covering more specific profiles of aid applicants and recipients to understand their user journey.
To ensure that our research is appropriate to the context and relevant for cash providers, we held a series of qualitative consultations with aid actors and affected communities in February 2023 to inform the design of our project. We also established an advisory group made up of cash practitioners to support the design of the data collection tools, data analysis, and formulation of recommendations based on our findings.
