WASHINGTON — The International Rescue Committee has been using cash transfers for more than 10 years to help people meet their basic needs of food, water, and housing in emergency or protracted crisis situations. Now, the humanitarian organization is exploring whether cash is a viable replacement for services in addition to in-kind goods.
In 2016, IRC set the goal of 25 percent of in-kind aid to be replaced by cash by 2020. But according to Radha Rajkotia, IRC’s senior technical director of economic recovery and development, the organization had already surpassed the 25 percent benchmark by mid-2018, and is re-evaluating its goals for cash programming.
“One of the questions that we’re looking at now — we’re looking at data right now to work out whether this is appropriate — is to consider whether we should be looking beyond just goods and into services,” Rajkotia said. “We [previously] based the goal on the denominator. Essentially the way we think about it is ‘what is the stuff that can be replaced?’”