Cash and Locally Led Response Working Group
The Cash and Locally Led Response Working Group’s purpose is to continue the work begun by the now concluded Grand Bargain Cash and local partnership sub-workstream.
The group is open to the whole Cash and Voucher Assistance (CVA)/humanitarian community, and currently we are encouraging local organisations and stakeholders to participate in order to share their experiences on the use of CVA and influence how to increase the leadership of local CVA actors.
The Grand Bargain independent review (HPG/ODI, 2021) recognized the success of the Grand Bargain Workstream 3 (the “Cash” workstream) in engaging local partners but also highlighted the need to focus further on “securing a fairer and more appropriate distribution of leadership and decision-making authority, as well as access to funding between international and local actors”.
The State of the World Cash report (CALP, 2023) that some progress towards locally-led response, but major change is lacking. While the barriers to progress reflect issues in the wider system, emerging models and different entry points offer new ways of working and important lessons for locally-led CVA.
The Cash and Locally Led Response Working Group will engage with Grand Bargain 3.0 to contribute to further progress on these issues as well as others that arise.
The Cash and locally Led Response Working Group is currently co-lead by Global Mentoring Initiative (GMI), Christian Aid, World Vision International (WVI), Community Empowerment for Rural Development (CEFORD) and the CALP Network (CALP). The Working Group meets every 4 months in 2024 and will be meeting quarterly as of 2025.
Current priorities of the Working Group:
- To enable local and national actors to engage in global platforms on cash and voucher assistance.
- To advocate for Cash and Voucher Assistance policies, systems and practices to be aligned with localization commitments, with a focus on relevant learnings and actions.
- Knowledge and information on Cash and Local Partnerships to be collated and shared.
Why should you join us?
- You will be part of an open space where you can share your experiences and knowledge, learn from colleagues around the world and have a saying in shaping the discussion around CVA.
- In the meetings, you will have the chance of networking, finding out about learning opportunities and ways to engage with relevant initiatives.
- You will learn about CVA and localization developments and updates.
- And you will have the chance to express your issues and contribute to current debates.
Please note that later on we will have a preparation session with the new members to discuss where we are, where we are going and so forth and identify their own priorities.
If you are interested in becoming a member of this group, submit your details by this form.
CALP is responsible for coordinating a number of other Cash Working Groups and Communities of Practice – sign up to them here.
Contacts
For more information you can contact the Cash and locally led response Working Group co-leads sending a message to: Smruti Patel (GMI) spatel@gmentor.org, Matthew Tebbut (Christian Aid), MTebbutt@christian-aid.org, Belete Temesgen (WVI) belete_temesgen@wvi.org, Juliet Donna (CEFORD) julietdonna@gmail.com or Crys Chamaa (CALP Network) crys.chamaa@calpnetwork.org
We will be happy to welcome you!
Further reading
Cash and Voucher Assistance (CVA) and Partnership Toolkit
Guidelines and Tools
This year(2020) has called for a strong reflection on what we mean by partnership and how we work responsibly within CVA programs in support of localizaiton. For example, what do equitable and equal partnerships look like and why they are critical for accountable and quality humanitarian programs? In what ways does partnerships and local leadership facilitate better responses for those...
Programming Guidance: Embedding Localisation in the Response to COVID-19
Guidelines and Tools
This guidance note describes key considerations for integrating local actors into the COVID-19 social protection and/or humanitarian cash response. Local actors are defined as national and sub-national entities and can include civil society organisations (CSOs), government, private sector actors, and communities themselves. They can take a variety of forms, including local NGOs, local...
State of the World’s Cash 2020 – Chapter 7: CVA integration with local systems
Report
For a relevant and sustainable response , the role of local actors and local systems is critical. There is a growing consensus regarding the importance of localisation within CVA, but little clarity on how to drive this forward in practice. Progress on localisation requires humanitarian actors to be actively committed to shifting the balance of power. This chapter asks: ‘How can CVA support...
Transferring power to local CVA actors : Rhetoric vs Reality
Blog Post
One of the major changes we’ve seen between the publication of the first State of the World’s Cash report in 2018 and this year’s report is an increased focus on the importance of localisation. If taken seriously, localisation could shake the foundations of the humanitarian system and radically transform the ways in which aid is delivered. There has been some progress in relation to...
