Global Humanitarian Assistance: Tracking Spending on Cash Transfer Programming in a Humanitarian Context

 Cash transfer programming (CTP) has been used for development purposes for a number of decades, particularly within social protection interventions. Large programmes began in middle-income countries such as Brazil and Mexico in the nineties and have spread more recently to low-income countries such as Ethiopia and Kenya.
In the last few years the humanitarian community has begun to replicate CTPs that were used in development contexts, and applied them to emergency settings, with shorter timeframes. As a result more and more organisations, donors and governments have started to use this type of intervention in crisis situations to meet basic needs.
In some circumstances CTPs have been used as a replacement for food aid, such as the provision of vouchers to enable recipients to purchase food items. This type of programming can also be applied to non-food items such as cash grants to assist in the building of temporary or permanent housing, or to help with access to basic services (such as education or health care).