Guidance On Promoting Child Protection Outcomes Through Cash-based Interventions

The increased use of cash-based transfers over the past decade has brought opportunities for efficiency gains in humanitarian aid, greater choice and flexibility for people receiving assistance and increased transparency, while providing an opportunity to support local economies. Pledges to further increase the use of cash-based interventions by donors, non-governmental organizations and agencies, including UNHCR, were made as part of the Grand Bargain in 2016. In the wake of these commitments, UNHCR developed its Policy on Cash-Based Interventions9 and a Strategy for the Institutionalisation of CashBased Interventions 2016–2020 that commit the agency to further scaling up cash assistance.

Children continue to make up approximately 40 per cent of people forcibly displaced.10 The question of how cash-based interventions involve and impact children is fundamental in the context of an increasing reliance on cash as the preferred transfer modality. As cash-based interventions increase in number and complexity, issues related to how cash transfer programmes offer new opportunities and challenges for creating protection outcomes for children, as well as questions around how cash can be leveraged to support child protection interventions, are more relevant than ever.

This guidance has been developed to assist the use of cash-based interventions to further child protection outcomes. It draws on existing knowledge and practice from UNHCR and other sources, and reflects input from a number of UNHCR stakeholders in country operations, at the regional level, as well as the Global Cash Operations and the Field Protection Service’s Child Protection Unit at headquarters. The guidance also reflects the work recently carried out by the Cash Transfer and Child Protection Taskforce of the Alliance for Child Protection in Humanitarian Action11 and seeks to link with ongoing work within other inter-agency platforms. It likewise draws on lessons from research conducted by UNHCR in Egypt, Jordan and Lebanon between 2018 and 2019 on the impact of cash-based interventions on protection outcomes.