Determining the Value of Cash Transfers – Preliminary Insights from LIME

In 2009, the multi donor funded Protracted Relief Programme (PRP) adopted LIME (Longitudinal approaches to Impact assessment, Monitoring and Evaluation) as the approach to be used both for establishing a PRP baseline and for on-going analysis of monitoring data in order to evaluate the effectiveness of PRP, to assess its impact and to contribute towards programme re-design in the context of the socio-economic changes taking place in the country.

LIME is based on 3 pillars depicted, Most Significant Change (MSC), Household Economy Analysis (HEA) and Benefit Cost Analysis (BCA). Collection of the baseline data from households and communities at 26 sites took place in a series of 4 visits to each site between July 2009 and June 2010. Detailed information about household livelihood strategies, household access to food, and household income and expenditure is available from the baseline and lends itself well to the current discussions around realistic values to be recommended for cash transfers to poor households in Zimbabwe.

The presentation begins with a look at the range of household incomes across the LIME sites. Gaps in household food requirements are then assessed in terms of cash equivalents, and finally priorities in household expenditure are briefly discussed. All results are presented in terms of wealth groups, (very poor , poor and better off), which were identified at each LIME site via community discussions.