Determining the Value of Cash Grants in Remote Access Areas

This review aims to complement the work of NRC within the framework of the ECHO funded Remote Cash Project by providing a comparative analysis of different means of determining the size of cash grants, with the development of practical recommendations for approaches that can be used in hard to access areas.

This report aims to highlight how the collective use of tools and approaches in humanitarian responses that involve CTP are now being used to support discussions around setting the value of cash transfers in humanitarian contexts where there are access issues and where remote management may be in place.

In NRC’s experience, agencies have adopted two main approaches to determining the size of cash grants distributed to populations affected by disaster. Both approaches culminate in the averaging out of grant size across a population, whereby each household (HH) receives the same amount of money meaning that with variances in need and HH size, grants will not be sufficient for all HH (and may more than cover the needs of some).