My first 100 days as CALP’s new Director

Just over 100 days into my new role as Director of CALP and I’m beginning to get to grips with the challenges and opportunities ahead for Cash and Voucher Assistance (CVA). CALP’s benchmark publication –  State of the World’s Cash 2023 – charts the incredible progress we have made in scaling up the use of CVA – and data confirms that in 2023 it constituted almost a quarter of international humanitarian assistance.   

This represents an incredible platform for making even more progress on the mission that drives us all – to put people at the centre of humanitarian responses. But there are challenges ahead – CVA is not immune to the headwinds the humanitarian sector faces – a sector that is over-stretched, under-funded and under attack.

Further challenges relate to a narrative that I’ve been picking up in a number of conversations – that ‘cash is done’. It’s vital that we reset this narrative and to make the case for how CVA can address the immense challenges ahead.  There are several threads to this reset.   

1. We need to decisively protect and reinforce the gains we have made in scaling up cash.   

This is the hard grind – but the biggest win. It’s always tempting to look for the next exciting policy idea and miss the obvious point that delivering and maintaining the momentum of a long-fought for policy agenda as powerful as CVA is a huge job and faces constant head winds.

CALP data demonstrates a great appetite for practical support and information about CVA and tells us that we need to continue to invest in the basics of putting policy into practice – to sustain the agenda.  

• Over 24,500 users accessed CALP self-directed e learning from Jan 2023 to Sep 24. In August 2023 when CALP advertised an on-line course for learners based in East and Southern Africa, we received over 200 applications, for only 30 spaces, the majority of them local actors.  

• In the first 11 months of 2024, there were 47,000 views of CALP’s Cash 101 and users downloaded 39,000 publications from our library 

• CALP’s communities of practice meetings regularly attract over 50 participants and are a vital forum for developing solutions. Currently, there are over 1,600 people subscribed to more than a dozen thematic, regional and global groups discussing and sharing experiences on CVA.

And whilst we (the humanitarian CVA community) think we may have made the case for CVA – we need to do much more to continue advocating for it. Shortfalls in funding leading to competition between actors, and a perception that cash is too ‘risky’ in insecure contexts, both threaten to knock CVA off course – we need the support of National Governments and Senior Leaders to keep it on track.  

2. There is scope to further scale up the use and reach of cash  

Scaling up CVA is not a silver bullet, but we know we can do much more, and it is part of the answer to the funding shortfalls in the humanitarian system. Digging beneath the data tells us that, in 2023, four contexts make up 53% of all CVA (Ukraine, Türkiye, Syria, Bangladesh).

Outside of these contexts CVA still accounts for less than 20% of country responses and often a lot less – well below the 30 to 50% of IHA that studies have told us could be delivered in cash.   

But scaling up is hard. Each humanitarian context brings its own unique and complex challenges and needs its own solution. In Sudan and Gaza humanitarian actors are working their way through multiple challenges, within precarious settings, including liquidity crises, the collapse of the formal financial sector, supply chain shortages and poor digital infrastructure to scale up the use of CVA – it’s difficult but it’s also clear that CVA is one potential solution to increasingly contested humanitarian access. It is also clear that the ‘low hanging fruit’ have been taken – navigating cash reluctance and cash bans will be as much about the political as the technical challenges.  

3. There is so much more we need to do to improve programme quality

Having done the hard work, we have an incredible CVA platform to support collaboration and innovation to ensure we provide more cash, more quickly and predictably to a greater number of people. The scale up of multi-purpose cash, the strong preference of people in crisis and a critical element of programme quality, has stalled. We need to shift from talking about the modality (cash) to talking about the outcomes it delivers to help build bridges. We need to go further and faster to leverage the CVA platform to address the long-standing and wicked challenges of inclusion – I’m inspired by CALP’s work to develop solutions for people on the move, our ongoing focus on gender and disability and our new work on leveraging the CVA community to drive financial inclusion.   

System evolution and innovation – will be critical to addressing the challenges of consolidation, scale and quality – we know more broadly the stagnating systems run the risk of becoming redundant and CVA is no exception.

We need to:

Do much better more quickly on locally led cash– the CVA community is well placed to drive change system change including by further strengthening the voice of local actors in cash working groups and the Cash and Locally Led Response Working Group, finding practical ways to operationalise donors’ commitments to more equitable partnerships and increasing the share of resources going to local actors and by supporting local actor ecosystems (local private sector or community based response actors) that operate around and can complement the formal humanitarian system.   

This new video fronted by a CALP colleague Jerome Balinton is a brilliant concise summary of why local leadership matters.   

Grasp the full power of digital and AI – the goal is simple: get funds to people in need, when they need them (if not before), and in their preferred way. Digital tools are the only way to achieve this. With payment technology and private-sector partnerships, funds can reach recipients in minutes, not days. AI has the potential to tackle organizational inefficiencies and bureaucracies, slashing decision-making times allowing us to focus on what truly matters, supporting people by understanding their needs.  CALP’s Payment Solutions Group is exploring many of these ideas and is open to new members.   

Crowd in new and more financing for people in crisis – a people-centred response means we need to continue looking beyond the humanitarian system and look at other potential routes by which people in crisis can receive support.  CALP is contributing to discussions to operationalise agendas around social protection and anticipatory action – but we also need to look beyond the formal systems – group solidarity and mutual aid, diaspora, direct giving, crowd sourcing, zakat are all supporting people in crisis – we need to understand if and how humanitarian system can complement these forms of support.    

Cash is not done – it is unfinished business. 

Against a bleak backdrop – cash is one of the few bright spots offering scope and opportunity to deliver greater choice and dignity to more people in crisis. As the Director of the CALP Network, I am committed to working with you to set an ambitious and exciting narrative for CVA and to deliberately and decisively safeguard the cash consensus.  

If you haven’t yet, please do reach out to me, follow me on LinkedIn or BlueSky, I’d love to hear from you!