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Between 90% and 100% of households in Yemen showed a preference for aid in the form of cash and voucher assistance, key informants told us in 2022.
So, I guess it might be reasonable to assume that programmes in Yemen were delivered accordingly? Not so. Cash assistance makes up only about 11% of the funded humanitarian response today, according to OCHA’s Financial Tracking Service.
Zoom out and the pattern holds. In Yemen and across the world, people prefer cash. Our recent rigorous analysis of needs assessments from across the world showed that most people affected by crises prefer cash. This held across more than a dozen crisis contexts regardless of region, crisis type, or population group – from 79% in Ukraine, 85% in Haiti, 89% in Afghanistan, and up to 98% in Myanmar and northwest Syria.
It’s not hard to understand why: As my colleague Manal Shehade said of the humanitarian cash response in Gaza: “The act of choosing and prioritising what to buy, of deciding for yourself, has carried meaning in a context where almost every other decision is made for you.”
Picture yourself in a crisis: Cash gets you exactly what you need, fast, and it boosts the local economy too. In-kind aid (such as food packages, blankets, or temporary shelter) chosen by someone else, often doesn’t meet your needs. Then there’s the queue and the risk – the dead weight of carrying it home along insecure paths and roads.
The result: Markets are full of resold aid selling for a fraction of its value – an entirely avoidable waste of resources. In a refugee camp in Rwanda, one study found that 89% of households reported selling part or all of their food assistance.
Crises are deepening around the world. The conflict in Yemen is re-igniting, displacing tens of thousands of people in recent weeks. Will humanitarians respond in line with people’s aid preferences?
We are still not listening
You’d expect the humanitarian system to be rebalancing towards cash. It isn’t.
Globally, cash and voucher assistance is falling in absolute terms and has flatlined at just 22% of humanitarian aid. The picture can be starker at country level: In Mali, 90% of people say they want cash, but it makes up only 6% of the response.
You would think that the preference for cash assistance would be music to humanitarians’ ears. After all, cash assistance is usually quicker, logistically simpler, involves fewer intermediaries, is easier to trace (when delivered digitally), and is 37.5% more efficient when compared to in-kind aid.
The same centralisation that sidelines cash also sidelines local and national responders – the organisations closest to people and best placed to deliver what people are asking for: cash.
Why is this? Partly, it’s structural. Responses are planned top-down: funding is raised, earmarked, and carved up by sector and agency mandates. Cash cuts across those sectoral silos and is often “orphaned” in the humanitarian system. And the same centralisation that sidelines cash also sidelines local and national responders – the organisations closest to people and best placed to deliver what people are asking for: cash.
How we start flipping the system
Assistance must be driven by the priorities and preferences of communities in crisis. As most people, in most places, tell us that they prefer cash assistance over other types of assistance, we have a responsibility to reflect that in how aid is designed and delivered.
Humanitarian actors cannot always meet every preference and that should be communicated clearly. People should not be given reason to feel that, when their views are solicited, their responses are merely filed away and ignored by those who seek to support them.
But respecting people’s preferences isn’t optional; it’s the foundation of accountability to affected populations. Humanitarians need to close this “accountability gap”.
This will require action in terms of:
- How we listen: Humanitarians must ask the right questions. In Somalia, 79% of people named food as their top need. That is often read as a vote for in-kind aid. It isn’t. It tells us what people need, not how they want to get it. Ask people both what they need and how they can best be supported to meet those needs.
- How we respond: Humanitarians must act on what we hear. In Mali, 90% of people say they prefer cash, yet cash makes up just 6% of the response plan. In Sudan it’s 67% versus under 10%, with similar numbers in the Democratic Republic of the Congo. In Chad, food was refugees’ biggest unmet need – and also the aid they resold most.
- How we fund: Donors must fund what people choose. In Ukraine, 79% of people prefer cash, yet in-kind aid rose to 78% of the response in 2024. Flexible funding that follows people’s preferences is fairer and more efficient: More of the value of each dollar goes directly to people in crisis.
Ultimately, we need to become a system guided by the people it serves.
That means giving people more control over how they navigate a crisis, rather than making those choices for them. We already know what people are asking for. Are we willing to act on it?
