From Mistrust to Complementarity: The Partnership between NGOs and Private Companies in the Provision of Humanitarian Aid in the Form of Cash

This article provides arguments to understand the rationale behind the use of cash transfers as a reference tool in humanitarian contexts. It seeks to offer more clarity about the roles and potential synergies between the traditional stakeholders of the sector (NGOs, international organisations), and the new actors represented by private companies. This exercise identifies shared and conflicting interests, the challenges, and opportunities faced by public-private partnerships for cash transfers and the most relevant steps to follow in building alliances. With the purpose of defining better spaces or leaderships to be claimed as their own, the article identifies as essential for NGOs humanitarian access, generating spaces for participation of affected communities in decision-making, the targeting of those who should be recipients of humanitarian aid, monitoring and accountability; while the private sector is called to facilitate innovation, lead the scale-up of interventions and the search for more efficient solutions. The article concludes with a description of possible trends in the humanitarian field as a result of the ongoing transformations.