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Technical standards and cash programming: How can they align?

By Vincent Trousseau (*)

Embracing the growing uptake of cash transfer programming across sectors and looking ahead to the needs facing the humanitarian community in the coming years, the Sphere Project and the Cash Learning Partnership (CaLP) recently established a strategic partnership. Together, we will complement current standards by developing further technical standards around multi-sectoral Cash Transfer Programming (CTP) and as part of the emerging Global Humanitarian Standards Partnership (GHSP).

On 26 April 2016, a diverse range of specialists in WASH, Shelter, MEAL and programme quality gathered in London for a workshop on the role of technical standards in CTP for Shelter and WASH, and on the linkages between CTP and fundamental concepts like quality, protection, accountability and realisation of rights.

The Sphere-CaLP partnership and the London workshop come at a particularly timely moment. UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon, in One Humanity: Shared Responsibility prepared for the World Humanitarian Summit, called for cash-based interventions to be the “preferred and default method of support” when market and operation conditions are conducive.

In parallel, a growing number of organisations are investing in capacity building and preparedness to scale-up their cash transfer response, shaking the very foundations of their traditional approach to aid delivery.

This shift towards an intrinsically people-centered approach resonates within large parts of the humanitarian community. Large-scale cash assistance now requires standards which are as robust as the technical standards for in-kind assistance, developed and refined over the past years by Sphere and Companion Standards.

“While in-kind programming will remain an important modality of assistance, market-based responses are increasingly seen as helping people make their own decisions”, says Sphere Project Director Christine Knudsen to set the stage. Humanitarian standards have been developed for specific sectors.

The rise of cash transfer programming calls for a new approach, transcending the traditional sectoral approach. “Our task is now to find new ways to address old problems around quality and accountability”, says CaLP Advocacy Coordinator Paula Gil Baizan.

Shelter assistance is a good example for the importance of quality and the shifting focus on accountability in a CTP approach. “Humanitarian actors have a responsibility to ensure that people using cash for shelter get quality shelter, respecting minimum quality standards” says Davide Nicolini, Global Focal Point for Shelter Cluster Coordination at UNHCR.

This means that it will be the construction industry, property regulations or community governments and architects who will need to adhere to standards such as the Sphere shelter standards. Issues around the volume of housing stock for rental, availability of land, availability of key construction materials and skills are moving into the focus of humanitarian response.

Simon Eccleshall, Head of Disaster and Crisis Management at IFRC, also pointed to the evolving nature of quality and accountability which may be significant: “CTP has the potential for transforming humanitarian assistance. There is some evidence that we are reaching a tipping point. We are at around 6% of humanitarian assistance delivered in the form of cash transfers, but some of the rhetoric talks about reaching 60% in the near future.”

Empowering vulnerable people to meet their own needs through the provision of cash means losing “control” over the use of humanitarian assistance. In such a situation, how can we ensure that the assistance will ultimately meet or exceed the quality of in-kind assistance currently provided?

This central question has pushed some donors to implement stricter requirements for post-distribution monitoring and accountability mechanisms. While challenging, these requirements are encouraging better programming and M&E practices.

A particularity of cash transfer programming lies in the role of private sector actors, including banks. The humanitarian community will increasingly rely on local actors for the provision of goods and services and to fulfil the needs of crisis- and disaster-affected populations. Standards around these interactions, including data protection, will need to be developed.

The involvement of local actors in response design, assistance delivery, M&E or even advocacy could benefit the humanitarian system if appropriate frameworks are in place.

Simon Eccleshall ended his intervention highlighting the role of confidence in scaling up cash transfers. “The current environment is still full of cash sceptics. Along with capacity building and support in preparedness, standards are what we need to give people confidence and to ensure greater accountability”.

In the current sector-based humanitarian architecture, where should standards on cash transfer programming sit? Jenny Lamb, Water and Sanitation Advisor for Oxfam, stresses that cash should not be seen as a stand-alone response modality. “We must think about how cash transfers integrate within a broader assistance package. Cash should be integrated in a whole range of standards”, argued Lamb, emphasising the balance between standardisation and flexibility.

The transformative potential of cash transfers on the humanitarian sector pervaded the workshop discussions, which ranged from cash influencing the current approaches to a complete re-thinking of the role for humanitarian agencies in assistance delivery.

Wendy Fenton, HPN Coordinator, challenged the group: “We do not need to do the same [as we currently do] with a little more cash; we rather need to go out of our comfort zone and rethink how assistance should be remodelled and what the appropriate role for humanitarian agencies should be.”

Participants further identified a set of critical issues to be considered when searching for the right balance between cash-based and technical standards-based response:

• Collective versus individual needs: The very nature of cash transfers, providing choice and allowing beneficiaries to prioritise their needs, creates a tension between humanitarian actors’ understanding of broader health implications and what people consider their priority needs. Standards should thus acknowledge the tension between freedom of choice and, for instance, public health imperatives. Non-negotiable technical minimum standards were proposed as a means to strike the right balance between collective and individual needs.

• Contextualisation and flexibility: In a similar vein, participants agreed on the need for standards to be highly flexible through the contextualisation of their indicators. Contextualised standards play a vital role in a complex world in providing benchmarks and navigating the responses in different contexts. For this, stronger focus must be placed on context, protection needs and market analysis prior to designing any kind of response. Solid analysis will facilitate meaningful monitoring and evaluation, which must factor in the freedom of choice and individual prioritisation of needs.

• Monitoring and evaluation: Specific M&E methodologies for cash transfer programming are needed. These can build on digital tools when appropriate such as in the case of e-transfers. Stronger data analysis capacity is however needed and may involve actors outside the humanitarian realm.

This workshop contributed to a greater question of how to put people’s rights back into a meaningful conversation. Indeed, multi-sectoral programming, the use of cash and their implications on humanitarian assistance seem to call for a new interpretation of the rights-based approach. Greater power at the community or individual level will be a game changer for current practice, and necessarily affect how standards evolve in humanitarian assistance.

Full engagement from all relevant sectors is needed during the upcoming Sphere Handbook revision to ensure that the Sphere technical standards fully embrace the emerging trend towards CTP and that cash-based programming maintains a strong link to quality assistance, for which the humanitarian community remains accountable, even if new actors come into play.

The Handbook revision, to be launched later in 2016 and run throughout 2017, will provide the platform for the crucial discussion on combining technical standards and cash-based approaches.

(*) Vincent Trousseau is CaLP Communication and Information Management Officer.