About Cash and Voucher Assistance (CVA) at Mercy Corps

Written by Kristin Smart, Director of CVA at Mercy Corps.

Program participants queue up to receive cash assistance in Northeastern DRC, which has been plagued by years of conflict and insecurity

Cash and Voucher Assistance (CVA) is a form of assistance that provides a direct transfer of cash and/or vouchers for goods or services to individuals, households, or group/community recipients. CVA is a tool that supports markets to recover quickly from crises by restarting or strengthening them for buying and selling critical goods and services. It puts people at the center of responses and enables people to buy what they need when they need it. CVA provides opportunities to address gender and equality gaps in digital, financial, and mobile inclusion, link to social protection systems, support local markets and actors, and facilitate economic opportunities for crisis affected communities.

Over the past decade, Mercy Corps has grown its use of CVA from a niche programming tool to a primary response modality.

On average, CVA programming represents 22% of Mercy Corps’ overall portfolio, with annual cash distributions of over USD 67 Million.

Alongside the growth of CVA, we have introduced minimum standards for quality implementation, developed toolkits and resources that are widely used, expanded our use of tech-enabled delivery and management systems, and become a leader in cash advocacy and the shift to collaborative cash delivery models. The CVA team at Mercy Corps works to support programs around the world to design and deliver effective, accountable, and people-centric CVA.

By using CVA in our programs, we support communities — and the most marginalized within them — to meet critical basic needs and set foundations for a more inclusive and resilient future.

Our Approach

CVA is a core part of Mercy Corps’ Pathway to Possibility. It is a tool proven to strengthen the resilience and capacities of people, markets, and institutions to handle shocks, reduce risk, build more equitable and responsive systems, and improve wellbeing.

Our programs put people at the core, while embracing safe and appropriate digital cash, creating opportunities for delivering at scale, and facilitating local response capacities.

Cash at scale

Mercy Corps aims to consistently deliver cash at scale, which not only supports widespread impact, quality programming, and cost effectiveness, but also provides the foundation for strengthening local response capacity and generating learning and evidence.

Cash and local response capacity

CVA in Mercy Corps is a tool to meet immediate needs alongside strengthening and supporting local response capacities for future crises, including markets, local responders and organizations, social protection systems, and communities.

Digital cash

Cash in Mercy Corps embraces the use of safe, relevant, and appropriate technology to support the design, delivery, and monitoring of CVA programs. Digitally equipped cash teams are well resourced to help communities cope, adapt, and thrive using thoughtfully integrated technology solutions.

Our Principles

Technical and program quality is the cornerstone of Mercy Corps’ work on CVA and drives our ability to positively impact program participants and the communities affected by crises. By focusing on how we design and deliver CVA (our approach to CVA) and the technical standards we follow (our Cash Minimum Standards), we aim to deliver timely, relevant, accountable, and efficient CVA responses. Our CVA principles:

• Cash is part of a complementarity and layered approach to programming. Driven by local needs and priorities, we sequence, layer, and integrate our cash assistance.
• Cash within MC is designed with people and communities at the center. Human-centered design and delivery is core to decision making on cash and voucher modalities and mechanisms and drives program design.
• MC operates a cash first approach whereby cash — particularly digital cash — is considered a primary response modality whenever feasible and appropriate.
• MC cash programs are intentionally designed and delivered with an awareness of gender, inclusion, and power dynamics with the aim of shifting power toward the communities served, and those most marginalized within them.
• Technical quality and excellence is central to cash at MC. We commit to continued focus on technical details, standards, knowledge management, and learning as tools through which to ensure accountable, effective, and appropriate use of CVA.
• Safe programming and protection, risk analysis and mitigation occur systematically and are used to inform CVA program design and adaptations across the program cycle.
• We use adaptive management and flexible program design (modalities and delivery mechanisms) to address risks and incorporate real-time learning throughout the project cycle.
• MC recognizes cash as a modality that supports access to immediate needs as well as longer-term transformations and resilience. To facilitate evidence and learning, MC programs track and work to account for the contributions of cash to the four outcomes of the P2P strategy and to inclusive and resilient futures.

A participant in San Juan, Puerto Rico receives a debit card from Mercy Corps, which distributed cash to communities affected by Hurricane Maria (left). Siblings play on a playground in front of their family’s temporary apartment after fleeing their home in Ukraine; the family received emergency cash assistance from Mercy Corps, which they used to purchase winter clothes and pay rent.

Our Programs

CVA in Mercy Corps is a widely used tool to support communities affected by crisis to cope, adapt and thrive. Some program examples include:

COPE

Mercy Corps and partners within the Ukraine Cash Consortium (UCC) worked to deliver multi-purpose cash assistance (MPCA), a cash transfer aimed at meeting a set of basic needs for survival. The program provides multi-month cash transfer to individuals affected by the on-going conflict in Ukraine.

ADAPT

The Rural Resilience Activity (RRA) in Nigeria, a long-term market systems development (MSD) program, implemented unconditional cash transfers and combined interventions that met immediate needs while layering with market systems development programming with the aim of strengthening the resilience of communities impacted by crisis.

THRIVE

The Ven Esperanza consortium in Colombia, led by Mercy Corps, developed a multi-year program to provide cash transfers alongside micro-business grants, nutrition, and protection activities to support Venezuelan refugees in Colombia to better integrate into their hosting communities.

Our Team

Kristin Smart | Director of Cash and Voucher Assistance
Mohamed Ireg | Advisor — Cash and Voucher Assistance
Kimberly Adams | Senior Advisor — Cash and Voucher Technology

From left to right: Kristin Smart, Mohamed Ireg, Kimberly Adams

For more information about Cash and Voucher Assistance at Mercy Corps, contact us at cashtransfers@mercycorps.org.