Central Africa Emergencies Newsletter: Spring 2019

Across the global humanitarian landscape, emergency relief and recovery programming has increasingly shifted from the direct distribution of supplies to the use of vouchers or cash to help people directly access or buy critical goods and services. In fact, cash and voucher assistance, or CVA, represented 10% of all assistance in 2016, or about $2.8 billion, up from 6% in 2014. Evidence shows that in many contexts CVA is not only appropriate and a better solution than in‑kind assistance, but also has multiplier effects on local economies and markets, and can more easily be brought to scale. Read about the impact and use of cash assistance across Central Africa, as CRS supports families and communities recovering from crisis. In this newsletter, you'll see how cash is shifting the humanitarian model to one driven more by beneficiary demand and ownership, enabling the people we serve to play a more active role in their recovery.