Cash and Voucher Assistance for Education in Emergencies

The Global Education Cluster has undertaken critical work aimed at deepening the limited evidence available around cash and voucher assistance within the education sector to highlight its potential, build requisite capacities among education in emergencies practitioners, and provide technical support to country coordination teams.

Cash and Voucher Assistance specifically refers to the provision of cash transfers or vouchers directly to aid recipients, and not to government or state actors. In development contexts it can be equated to social assistance, which transfers money to individuals and households to ensure they can access basic goods and services. In humanitarian contexts, cash is a modality used to address needs caused by conflict, natural disasters and other types of crisis. 

Cash interventions have been used in the education in emergencies space to tackle issues around school materials and access to learning such as the payment of school and exam fees. The Education Sector is also working to identify the most appropriate way of using multipurpose cash grants to ensure necessary sectoral outcomes and considering ways to complement cash-based assistance with other sectoral activities.

In the current landscape of consistently increasing humanitarian needs, cash-based assistance is positioned to diminish the gap between needs and resources through increased efficiency and effectiveness. Cash-based assistance not only offers beneficiaries more flexibility and dignity to meet their needs, it also has a positive impact on local economies.

With generous support from DG ECHO and technical support from NORCAP, the Global Education Cluster has made great strides in advancing its work around cash and voucher assistance for education in emergencies: 

• Produced a Synthesis Report and Guidelines to deepen the evidence and highlight CVA’s potential within the sector and support the work of education cluster coordinators and education programme staff
• Establish the Global Education Cluster Cash Task Team, who work from 2019 to 2023 around the areas of evidence, guidance, tools and capacity building
• Integrate findings from the research into the Global Education Clusters' capacity development tools
• Provide technical support to country clusters on integrating CVA into cluster work, in particular in the HNO/HRP process and strategy development

Please contact the Global Education Helpdesk for questions related to the Global Education Clusters' work on Cash and Voucher Assistance. The GEC is also facilitating the Cash Task Team. Click here for more information and key resources.

Generously supported by DG ECHO.