Cash and Voucher Programming

Cash Voucher Programming

Financial or cash voucher assistance/ programming is no longer viewed as an innovation, but as a standard preferred modality-set of the humanitarian and recovery toolkit, in use by World Vision since over 20 years and reflected in World Vision’s global strategic Cash Roadmap 2.0 - New Avenues. 

Cash and voucher assistance is the provision of cash or vouchers directly to individuals, households or communities to meet their basic needs. Cash and voucher-based programming: 

• Provides immediate survival assistance and helps children and their caregivers to recover and thrive by addressing the underlying issues of poverty.
• Promotes dignity for people affected by emergencies, providing them with choice, control and flexibility.
• Builds resilience, by driving the recovery of local markets,   connecting beneficiaries, as consumers, with local suppliers and service providers, building the local economy where supply is adequate and accessible to most vulnerable community members.
• When done right and done well, cash and voucher-enabled programming (whether sector-specific or addressing multiple basic needs) puts people at the centre of any humanitarian response.

World Vision's Response 

In response to the socio-economic impacts of the pandemic, governments have introduced over 1,600 social protection measures in almost all the world's countries and territories. Cash assistance - a critical intervention in supporting the world's most vulnerable people - also grew by 240% during this time, reaching 1.1 billion people. However, most of these support systems are temporary, and there are critical gaps in coverage, adequacy and comprehensiveness of social protection interventions.  

World Vision's approach to social protection includes direct delivery of social protection assistance through cash and voucher programmes; facilitating access to government-led social protection; improving the effectiveness of the government-led social protection by promoting the voices and accountability of community members; and advocating for social protection that is child-sensitive, gender-responsive, inclusive and accountable by leveraging social accountability approaches that have proven to put affected communities at the centre promoting decision-making and rights based approaches with constructive dialogue and effective improvement of access, scale, quality of support provided by duty-bearers. 

For World Vision, having reached over 7.8 million people in 46 countries in FY22 through transfer -  and increasingly beyond humanitarian Disaster Management sectors -cash and voucher transfers are close to 55% of our global modality portfolio. Furthermore, cash and voucher assistance is 20% more cost-effective than in-kind assistance. It strengthens local economic resilience and choice for vulnerable population, building local self-reliance despite and in the midst of a protracted humanitarian crisis.  See our impact in 2022. 

CoSMAT has been developed by World Vision’s Fragile Context Peacebuilding and Disaster Management/ Cash Voucher Teams and brings key considerations of conflict and market analysis tools1 into one practical field application for field frontline staff. It consists of a simple 4 step process to collect information, conduct analysis, map key risks and develop mitigation and joint action plans between World Vision teams, community members, local market actors and government representatives.

World Vision is actively engaged in inter-agency fora – including Grand Bargain 2.0 Cash Coordination Caucus, as CashCap Steering Committee Chair, as Co-Lead for the global Collaborative Cash Delivery Network (CCD), as co-lead in many global sector cluster Cash/ Market Task Teams/ WGs, in the Social Protection Inter-Agency Cooperation Board-CVA-SP Group, and in donor and UN engagement fora. 

Learn more about World Vision New Avenues - Cash Roadmap 2.0 (FY24-27)