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Multipurpose Cash Assistance

Multipurpose cash assistance offers people affected by crises the flexibility and dignity to choose how to cover their needs. But humanitarian actors must find new ways of working together to ensure it is incorporated effectively into the humanitarian system.

Multipurpose Cash (MPC) are unrestricted cash transfers that people affected by crises can use to cover their basic needs. By its nature, MPC is the assistance modality which offers people a maximum degree of choice, flexibility and dignity. There is also growing evidence that it is more cost-efficient and cost-effective to meet multiple needs.

But this requires new ways of collaborating between humanitarian actors, at all stages of the program cycle, and across sectors. While solid tools exist to support collaboration, they have not been widely adopted and MPC is still used in an ad-hoc way. Challenges remain to be addressed if we are to successfully fit MPC into the humanitarian system.

Latest

MPESA Project Analysis: Exploring the use of cash transfers using cell phones in pastoral areas

Report

Safaricom Limited, a mobile network operator in Kenya, launched a mobile money transfer system called M-PESA in 2007. This system allows users to send or receive money on their Safaricom SIM card. Télécoms sans Frontières and Vétérinaires sans Frontières – Germany decided to work in partnership on...

2012

Cash and Child Protection: How cash transfer programming can protect children from abuse, neglect, exploitation and violence

Guidelines and Tools

This discussion paper examines the links between cash transfers and the positive and negative outcomes for children – in particular, the role cash transfers have played in protecting children from abuse, neglect, exploitation and violence. It aims to identify ways in which cash transfer activities could...

2012

Examining Differences in the Effectiveness and Impacts of Vouchers and Unconditional Cash Transfers

Report

The objective of this study is to examine the differences in the effectiveness and impacts of vouchers versus unconditional cash transfers in the Bushani camp of the Masisi territory of the Democratic Republic of Congo. As part of this research, the study team collected household data from over...

2012

Delivering Cash Through Cards – A Quick Delivery Guide (booklet)

Guidelines and Tools

A Quick Delivery Guide to delivering money through cards (magnetic stripe or smart cards).  Prepared as a practical tool, this guide provides a brief synthesis of the necessary preconditions and advantages and disadvantages of using cheques.  It also provides practical implementation tips. This version...

2011

Richer but Resented: What do cash transfers do to social relations and does it matter?

Report

This paper looks at how social protection cash transfers are evaluated primarily in terms of poverty reduction or human capital, with their impact on social relations being under-examined. The authors examine case studies from Kenya, Malawi and Zimbabwe, and argue that the impact of cash transfers on...

2011

CCT Programmes and Women’s Empowerment in Peru, Bolivia and Ecuador

Report

Latin America’s efforts to alleviate poverty have resulted in reducing poverty in twelve countries, most strikingly in Mexico and Brazil. The adoption of Cash Transfer programmes in much of the region is credited with helping to bring this reduction about. These programmes are widely promoted as a cost...

2011