Field manual for humanitarian e-voucher programs in Turkey

Welthungerhilfe has been active using e-vouchers in response to the Syrian refugee crisis since 2014, and has provided more than 100,000 individuals with unconditional cash transfers funded by the Federal German Foreign Office, ECHO, the European Commission’s Humanitarian Aid Office, and UNICEF. Intervention areas covered urban and rural settings in southern Turkey and featured various framework conditions that determined the way the different projects were implemented.

The Field Manual’s aim is to compile the vast experience amassed in the previous two-and a half years by Welthungerhilfe in order to:

• Collect practices used in Turkey in e-voucher programming and implementation.
• Facilitate a dialogue between the staff concerned as to improve the quality of delivery.
• Document best practices in terms of approaches, tools, and know-how to be used by practitioners within and beyond Welthungerhilfe.
• Provide guidelines on how Welthungerhilfe implements e-voucher programs in Turkey to ensure consistency in programming and implementation.
• Identify weaknesses and potential to improve future projects.
• Contribute to the ongoing discussion within the humanitarian community regarding cash Based Interventions.

The manual details the steps of implementing e-voucher programs in Turkey, gathers all tools utilized, and cites the theoretical discussion as a reference point for decisions to be taken.

The structure of the manual will, on the one hand, ‘tell the story’ of e-voucher programs in Turkey and, the same time, can be used as a manual or a reference source for ideas on possible ways of dealing with issues that may arise when implementing an e-voucher program.

The experiences and methods described in this manual are intended as guides and inspiration for colleagues from other organizations that may implement similar projects. Deliberations on which approach to use under which circumstances have been included – ‘one size fits all’ is not a suitable approach for e-voucher programming – and even though this booklet aims at providing a step-by-step guide, implementing such a project always requires conscious decisions on how to move forward. Although this might be a bit tiring for the reader, it may help others have the right discussions at the right time in order to make most out of e-vouchers in order to better serve people in need.