The impact of cash transfers on nutrition in emergency and transitional contexts – Research reports and studies

The purpose of this paper is to explore evidence on the nutritional impact of cash transfers in emergency and transitional settings. It looks at how cash interventions affect the immediate and underlying causes of malnutrition. Two priorities identified by the paper are particularly relevant to this study: the need to expand the use of cash as a food assistance tool, and the importance of considering the nutritional outcomes of food assistance. Divided into 4 chapters, the document begins with an introduction on cash transfer programming on nutrition, followed by Chapter 2, which examines the immediate and underlying causes of malnutrition and how, in theory, cash transfers could address them; Chapter 3 examines humanitarian cash transfer interventions and whether there is evidence for these impacts in practice. Evidence from social protection programming and its applicability to the study question are explored in Chapter 4, and Chapter 5 provides conclusions and discusses what is needed to move forward.
The document was commissioned by the German Federal Ministry for Economic Cooperation and Development (BMZ) through the Deutsche Gesellschaft für Internationale Zusammenarbeit (GIZ).