Use of Cash and Voucher Assistance for the Protection, Education, and Well-Being of Adolescents in Crisis

In many humanitarian contexts, Cash and Voucher Assistance (CVA) is considered a relevant and vital modality to support programs to prevent and respond to complex protection issues and achieve education and well-being outcomes. While cash and voucher assistance is increasingly common in emergency response programs, there is little guidance on its use in multi-sectoral programs to support adolescents in crisis. In addition, systematic evidence and learning on the ability of cash and voucher assistance to achieve protection, education, and well-being outcomes for adolescents is limited.

The Women’s Refugee Commission and Plan International (Plan), with support from the Swedish International Development Cooperation Agency (SIDA), are synthesizing learning and strengthening Plan’s internal capacity to integrate CVA into programs to effectively achieve protection, education, and well-being outcomes for crisis-affected adolescent girls and boys (ages 10 to 19). The documents listed below describe this learning.

Forthcoming resources include a toolkit on CVA for adolescent outcomes, which will be available in early 2021. The toolkit will be piloted across several humanitarian settings where Plan is engaged in CVA for adolescents programing. All project resources are open source and will be shared to ensure broad access by humanitarian actors, with the aim of enhancing CVA to maximize benefits for adolescents.