CVA for Protection: A Mapping of IRC’s Use of Cash and Voucher Assistance to Help Achieve Protection Outcomes

The IRC first began to integrate cash into protection programs in 2013, leveraging the flexibility of CVA to support clients living in urban refugee contexts in the Middle East. Since then, IRC has rapidly expanded its use of CVA to help achieve protection outcomes. This scale-up has come with important questions: When can we introduce CVA to help amplify the impact of traditional protection services? In which cases can delivering CVA without complementary programmatic activities meet specific protection outcomes? And how do we provide CVA directly to adolescents in order to achieve better outcomes for girls and boys? As the humanitarian community at large looks to understand the potential uses of CVA across sectors, this document highlights the IRC’s program models that are leveraging CVA to help prevent and respond to violence, and to amplify protection outcomes for the clients we serve.