Improving the Delivery of Cash to People in Emergencies

The Airbel center is thrilled to share a report on the results of a new pilot aimed at testing and iterating innovative solutions to reducing the time to delivery and improving the cost efficiency of emergency cash transfer programs in Pakistan. This report details the approach and findings of IRC’s fourth pilot in this area; details of the first three pilots can be found here. We evaluated all innovations in programming approach against several key metrics, including time to delivery, cost efficiency, user satisfaction and targeting accuracy.

The initial pilots tested an innovative targeting approach using household-level data from a national socio-economic registry database of the Benazir Income support Program (BISP), and combined this with an end-to-end technology platform to manage workflow and data. This model enabled us to cut in half the time to delivery of cash relief, significantly improve the cost-efficiency, and reduce by two-thirds the opportunity cost of lost wages to the community due to participation in the program.

This report describes the results of Pilot 4 of the new cash delivery operating model — testing the speed, cost efficiency and accuracy of the new approach to deliver cash to 1200 households in response to a drought emergency in the remote Tharparkar district in Sindh Province of Pakistan

Click here to read the full report.

This project was funded with UK aid from the UK government.