Cash and Voucher Assistance (CVA) Programs Overview
Cash and Voucher Assistance (CVA) programs are humanitarian aid interventions that provide individuals and households with financial resources or vouchers to meet their basic needs in times of crisis or vulnerability. These programs give recipients the freedom and flexibility to prioritize their expenditures based on their personal needs, ensuring dignity and autonomy in how they manage their relief.
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Follow the guide below to learn about CVA projects the CommCare template application, and how to gain access to it, and adapt it for use in your own organization!
What Makes A Cash Project?
There are many types of CVA projects: they span different sectors and geographies and respond to various crises and events. One CVA project could give mass distributions to all families in a certain region affected by a hurricane, while a second CVA project could give very targeted distributions to all refugee families experiencing homelessness. What makes them fall under the CVA umbrella is the fact that they have some sort of cash or voucher distribution component.
Broadly speaking, in order to categorize projects based on how they will use CommCare for cash, we will split them into two types:
Pure Cash
In a “Pure Cash” project, the primary aim of the CommCare application and/or project is to distribute cash. The app is solely focused on workflows related to determining eligibility and amounts of distributions, tracking distributions and approvals, and doing post distribution monitoring. Other, non-cash distribution-related services are not tracked within the application.
Cash+
In a Cash+ project, cash distribution is just a part of the larger project / application. For instance, an application may track clients who are referred for multi sectoral services. The application is used to deliver these services and track clients as they progress through the services-- for example, a client as they receive legal services and work through their case. A small subset of clients who receive one of those services might be eligible for cash. Within the workflows in the app, eligible clients will be identified, and then cash distributions initiated for those people.
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The Template Application created here and shared below can work for either a Pure Cash or Cash+ project. We have instructions for how you can take and use this template application depending on your use case, because we know that each project will approach CVA in a different way.
Standard CVA Workflow
While every CVA project will look different, they all follow the same general workflow with the same steps:
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CVA programs are an essential tool for providing timely, efficient, and empowering assistance during emergencies, and this mobile application further enhances their reach and impact by making the process more accessible and transparent.
CommCare for CVA in Action
Save the Children, a CommCare Enterprise partner, has built an advanced cash and voucher assistance application for use across their global offices. See the video below for a demo of their application, app set up, and dashboards.
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