Cash Consortium for South/Central Somalia: Combined Risk Analysis

Since mid-2011, the Cash Consortium has been providing access to food and other non-food items through unconditional cash grants for the most vulnerable populations in South Central Somalia. The context is highly challenging, due to continuing conflict, lack of governance, high criminality and low levels of humanitarian access to affected populations.

In response to difficulties encountered in the field and the findings of the external evaluation, this paper has been written to articulate the Consortium’s position on mitigating risk in general, including the risks of diversion and fraud. It updates and complements the risk mitigation strategy which was developed in 2011, and is based on a number of sources: interviews with each agency’s field teams, a format/tool developed by Save the Children that draws on standard operating procedures for cash programming, as well as research and guidelines consolidated through the the CALP Network.