Humanitarian agencies are increasingly using cash-based responses to meet the food needs of households affected by crisis. This literature review concludes that cash transfers can be appropriate and effective in improving food consumption in humanitarian settings. Cash and vouchers specifically have often performed better than food aid at improving measures of diet diversity, though this is not universal as households might use the transfer to increase staple food consumption. The limited data on calorie consumption suggests that food aid tends to have larger impacts on this aspect of food consumption.
Cash transfers are particularly appropriate in situations where people have faced a food security shock and the problem is one of access and not availability. Food is consistently the largest reported expenditure of cash transfers, and cash and vouchers enable recipients to purchase a wider variety of commodities, including non-food items, than they would have received in the form of in-kind food aid. It can be useful to ensure that the value of the cash transfer is sufficient to enable beneficiaries to purchase their missing food entitlements while also providing a margin for other essential expenditures.
However, the appropriateness and effectiveness of cash, vouchers and food aid in improving food consumption depends entirely on the context and the objectives of the intervention. The evidence also suggests that different types of transfers enable households to pursue different strategies – positive and negative – in response to food insecurity. Decision-makers should keep in mind that cash, vouchers and food aid can be used in combination, and that the type of transfer provided is only one element that will influence food consumption outcomes. Other factors, such as the value of the transfer and the quality of implementation and targeting, may be of equal or greater importance.
Humanitarian actors with useful experiences from which aid agencies newer to cash transfer programming can benefit include WFP; NGOs such as Oxfam, ACF, Save the Children UK and Adeso; and donors like ECHO.
