Over 300 million people are currently in need of humanitarian assistance, driven by a record number of armed conflicts and weather-related disasters. However, funding has not kept pace with escalating needs—a problem that will worsen as funding cuts go into effect—leaving people at risk of starvation, violence, disease, and more. In response, humanitarian organizations are looking for more cost-effective and flexible approaches to deliver assistance, increasingly turning to cash transfers or vouchers that people can redeem at different vendors.

Cash and voucher assistance reduces families’ food insecurity during humanitarian crises. Across diverse crisis settings, from Afghanistan to Niger, cash and voucher assistance improves households' food security by helping families eat more often and eat a wider variety of foods.

Cash gives families the power to decide what they need most. Where markets are functioning, cash offers people maximum flexibility relative to vouchers or in-kind assistance like food parcels, and evidence shows families use cash wisely. In the Democratic Republic of Congo, for example, recipients used their cash transfers on more diverse food and non-food items than voucher recipients, including health expenses, school fees, and debt reimbursements.

Cash can improve more aspects of people’s lives in humanitarian settings. Emerging evidence suggests that cash can also improve mental well-being and economic stability. For example, in Afghanistan, women who received a cash transfer were happier and felt better about their economic situation. In Niger, women who received mobile cash transfers, compared to physical cash, were more likely to travel to markets, sell household grains, and spend more on children’s clothing. These findings point to the broader potential of cash to improve outcomes beyond food security, building on substantial evidence showing cash transfers improve people’s well-being in a range of non-crisis settings. However, more research is needed to better understand how programs impact outcomes like health, education, social cohesion, and women’s empowerment in humanitarian settings.

Cash and voucher assistance often achieves similar or better outcomes than in-kind aid, at a lower cost. Cash transfers are more cost-effective than vouchers and cost less to deliver. Vouchers are, in turn, more cost-effective than in-kind aid. In Yemen, delivering cash cost less than distributing food, though both improved food security. In the Democratic Republic of Congo, cash transfers were more cost-effective than vouchers, leading to comparable impacts on food consumption and household well-being. However, in Ecuador, the relative cost-effectiveness of cash versus vouchers varied by outcome. They both helped families consume more, but vouchers better improved families’ dietary diversity and calorie intake—though families preferred cash. Food aid was the least cost-effective way to help families eat more or eat a wider variety of foods, but families still preferred food aid over vouchers. More research is needed on blended delivery models—such as “cash plus,” which provide not only cash but also access to health care, education, skills training, or other services and goods.

Mobile cash transfers can further lower costs and increase flexibility for beneficiaries. In Niger, the per-transfer cost for mobile payments was about twenty percent lower than delivering cash in person, and helped families eat more diverse diets. It also saved people time: mobile transfer recipients avoided long trips and waits at distribution centers, gaining back about twenty hours over five months. In Afghanistan, sending US$1 to beneficiaries’ mobile phones cost 6.7 cents, less than half of the 17 cents per dollar it cost the World Food Programme to deliver physical cash. Once phones and mobile money agents are in place, mobile transfers could be a simple, affordable way to reach people in crisis.

How aid is delivered, and in what context, can influence program impact. Cash, vouchers, or in-kind assistance may each be better at shifting certain outcomes than others, depending on the goals of the program. For example, in Ecuador and Yemen, cash and vouchers improved dietary diversity more than food aid, but food assistance led to greater calorie intake. The type of crisis, local market conditions, implementation costs, and more can all influence the appropriateness and effectiveness of different methods of delivering aid. Where local markets are functioning and accessible, cash transfers give people the flexibility to meet their most pressing needs. Vouchers may be more appropriate when some market access exists, but programs want to direct spending toward specific goods to meet particular health or nutrition goals, like dietary diversity. In-kind aid may be more appropriate if markets are limited or not functioning (e.g. if markets are temporarily destroyed or inaccessible after a flood), though it is often more costly to deliver.