Emergency Multi-Purpose Cash Assistance to Conflict-Affected Populations in Iraq

The Cash Consortium of Iraq (CCI), led by Mercy Corps and including the Danish Refugee Council (DRC), the Norwegian Refugee Council (NRC) and the International Rescue Committee (IRC), proposes a 12-month programme that will address the urgent basic needs of conflict-affected households through one-off and multiple months of MPCA. The programme will target both newly displaced households and returnees, and extremely vulnerable host and protracted displaced households to help them meet their urgent basic needs. This programme will allow the CCI to leverage existing cash resources, create synergies amongst different donors and grants and deliver faster, more effective and well documented assistance throughout Iraq. Under the proposed programme CCI partners will provide beneficiaries with multi-purpose cash assistance, now considered as the most suitable modality to meet the urgent basic needs of diverse beneficiaries, and will continue implementing the MPCA strategy outlined in the 2016 Humanitarian Response Plan (HRP) at the core of its response efforts for first- and second-line assistance. As such, the CCI will: (1) Provide rapid one-off emergency transfer (at 400 USD) for newly displaced and returnee households to meet their urgent basic needs; extremely vulnerable households from this caseload will receive additional two months of Multi-Month Cash Assistance (MMCA) at 360 USD per month; additionally, the most vulnerable from host communities and protractedly displaced will receive three months of MMCA (at 360 USD each month); (2) the CCI will build on the IRC study of government-led social protection initiatives to examine and pilot potential linkages between humanitarian cash interventions and the government social protection network. Given the current fiscal crisis, emphasis will be placed on exploring structural support and alignment. CCI partners will use multi-month household expenditure data to position MPCA at the centre of the humanitarian system by providing actionable data for gap-filling and follow up from other sectors/clusters. Expenditure Post Distribution Monitoring (PDM) data will be used as a consistent source to accurately identify household needs and gaps within the rapidly evolving existing response, thus enabling the CCI to share this information with the wider humanitarian community towards the areas in which non-cash assistance is needed. The CCI uses expenditure data as a consistent source to understand households’ priorities; and also to demonstrate that with one transfer, MPCA allows beneficiaries the flexibility to address their needs across traditional sectors, transcending the United Nations Cluster system approach – through expenditures in categories ranging from food, healthcare and shelter.