No Small Change - Oxfam GB Malawi and Zambia Emergency Cash Transfer Projects: a Synthesis of key learning

In response to predictions of acute food insecurity across parts of Southern Africa in 2005–2006, Oxfam decided to implement a relief response. As part of that response, the agency undertook cash transfer programmes as an alternative to emergency food aid in Malawi and Zambia. Evaluations carried out by ODI in April and May 2006 show that cash transfers should be considered more widely by other stakeholders in Zambia and Malawi in future relief responses. However, whether cash is appropriate or cost-effective in future interventions cannot be assumed. Instead, this will have to be judged on a case-by-case basis, using careful, context-specific analysis, particularly of prices and markets.
Cash transfers should be one of the tools in the armoury of possible responses to periodic acute food insecurity. Ideally, designing the mix of responses to food crises in Southern Africa should be part of a broader process of vulnerability assessment and analysis (carried out by Vulnerability Assessment Committees (VACs)), linked to explicit and open discussions about the relative cost-effectiveness and wider appropriateness of different options.