Attachments
Executive summary
Lebanon is facing a severe humanitarian crisis exacerbated by economic turndown, widespread poverty, and displacement resulting from the escalation of the hostilities into war between Hezbollah and Israel on September 23, 2024. A ceasefire was reached in the early hours of November 27, 2024, for a 60-day period. The dramatic wave of violence on 23 and 24 September pushed up to one million people away from their homes in the South, Beirut southern suburbs or the Eleqaa in the span of a few days. Almost symmetrical movements took place the days following the cessation of hostilities, mainly reflected in numbers, as many people could not return to their homes, either because they were damaged or located in territory still occupied by Israel.
There has been a significant scale up of the cash response, mostly through the expansion of the Government-lead safety nets. This paper focuses on the opportunities and pitfalls of the complementarities between emergency humanitarian cash response and existing safety nets. Therefore, while most CVA findings would apply across population groups, including Syrian refugees who have been equally affected by the conflict, this paper narrows the elements to the Lebanese population.
The aim of this paper is to deliver a nuanced conversation surrounding ways of cash in an emergency response, and in particular the added value of having Government safety nets and humanitarian cash mutually strengthen one another. As such, this paper seeks to enhance the humanitarian response and provide recommendations to support the development and implementation of novel policies and practices to improve the cash response in Lebanon.
Key highlights:
1. There has been a significant scale up of the Government-led safety net to provide support to vulnerable households, who have been recently discontinued from different forms of assistance by WFP/MoSA and either originating from insecure areas or living in areas where displaced people had relocated. As evidenced in other contexts, this is indeed a good vehicle for a swift expansion of cash programming in a crisis. However, the design of this program has not been adjusted in parallel to the drastic change in context, neither in its targeting nor the support package it provides -in the sense that transfer value that is relevant for a poverty reduction program may not be suitable for humanitarian needs during displacement and returns to areas affected by the conflict.
2. The weaknesses of the coordination around cash in Lebanon did not create the opportunity to discuss how humanitarian partners and the emergency response could complement the existing safety net, with a temporary cash top up or the temporary inclusion of new households who have been pushed into a high level of vulnerability because of the conflict.
3. Cash actors and the overall coordination factored the dimensions of market functionality and market accessibility, with regular disseminated market functionality monitoring by WFP, and individual organizations assessments. Cash remained feasible in the areas where most of the response was happening, outside of the areas that were highly insecure. It is worth noting that despite markets being functional, and cash being the preferred modality in most cases, in-kind distributions were sometimes recommended as response modality by sectors.
4. While questions around targeting and arbitraging the transfer values for cash are always sensitive, it seems that there was no space for these discussions in Lebanon apart from the Protection Working Group, as all efforts and intention for the scale-up of cash were through the safety net, without reviewing key aspects of its design.