Attachments
A. EXECUTIVE SUMMARY
About the report
Oxfam conducted this Vanuatu Cash Transfer Feasibility Assessment in partnership with Youth Challenge Vanuatu, Department of Agriculture & Rural Development, and the Vanuatu National Statistics Office with funding from the Australian Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade (DFAT) through the Australian Humanitarian Partnership (AHP) Disaster-Ready Initiative. The assessment is part of the regional Pacific Cash Preparedness Partnership, a partnership between Oxfam, Save the Children and the United Nations World Food Programme, which is focused on conducting a series of feasibility assessments across Vanuatu, Fiji, and Solomon Islands in order to increase awareness, capacity and expertise in Cash Transfer Programming (CTP) in the Pacific Islands.
The overarching objective of the assessment is to build a strong and context-specific evidence base to guide and inform national discussions, awareness and preparedness initiatives related to the use of cash transfers as a means of humanitarian assistance for response, recovery and resilience programs. Particularly, this report informs country-level cash transfer preparedness to enable more efficient and effective emergency CTP in Vanuatu. The report identifies:
• locations where cash transfers are a viable approach to deliver emergency assistance in Vanuatu;
• to whom cash transfers may be appropriately delivered;
• when this type of assistance is most effective; and
• preliminary recommendations based on the research findings on how (in what form) cash transfers can be delivered in Vanuatu.
This research was endorsed as being consistent with the Government’s National Sustainable Development Plan 2016–2030 and Vanuatu Climate Change and Disaster Risk Reduction Policy 2016–2030; both of which focus on enhancing the country’s resilience and adaptive capacity to climate change and natural hazards, reducing the impact of disasters on long-term development, and increasing the effectiveness and impact of disaster response.
Cash transfers are now widely recognised as being cost effective and an efficient form of disaster assistance that empowers people to make their own choices about what their household needs are after a disaster. It also revitalises and strengthens local markets, supporting the long-term development of the affected area. However, despite the Pacific’s exposure to numerous and frequent natural hazards, until now, CTP has not been the preferred disaster assistance modality —large-scale, in-kind distributions have taken precedence.
The CaLP Feasibility Scoping study for CTP in the Pacific found significant opportunities in the region for scaling up and using CTP more regularly as an emergency response modality. However, due to the uniqueness of each Pacific country, in-depth country-specific research was recommended as a key next step in order to gauge the feasibility of cash transfers in each country. In line with this recommendation, this nationwide Cash Transfer Feasibility Assessment was undertaken in Vanuatu with the aim of ensuring that the benefits and challenges of CTP are more fully understood.
The feasibility assessment drew upon secondary and primary data sources. The primary sources come from two Oxfam-led field assessments that were carried out from March 2018 to June 2018, the first being the general cash transfer feasibility assessment, and the second being the CTP service provider capacity assessment. The results of these two assessments together form the core of the Vanuatu Cash Transfer Feasibility Assessment. The report aims to answer the following research questions:
• Where is CTP feasible?
• Who are key stakeholders who will benefit from CTP?
• What needs can CTP address after a disaster?
• How could CTP be delivered in Vanuatu via existing financial and market systems?
To do this, the Cash Transfer Feasibility Assessment6 is structured around four indicators identified as essential dimensions when measuring the overall feasibility of a CTP: access, acceptance, appropriateness and market capacity. The report is structured around addressing overall feasibility of CTP at the national level across the four indicators before then analysing each of the six provinces separately.