Cash Assistance to People on the Move: Risk, Vulnerability and Resilience in Refugee Governance

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Abstract

Cash assistance now comprises 21% of global humanitarian aid distributed through the formal aid sector. For people displaced by conflict and disasters, cash assistance has become a popular mode of assistance delivery. For humanitarian organisations, cash assistance has been enabled by the introduction of digital and data-driven technologies into humanitarianism. In this talk, I share findings from a recent project on “Digital Connectivity and Financial Inclusion in Refugee Governance,” which included research in Greece, Jordan, Lebanon and the UK. Through interviews with experts in cash assistance programming, our team explored the use of algorithms to determine vulnerability to severe poverty. The humanitarian sector’s turn to data-driven and digital technologies introduces new risks, even while risk and vulnerability analyses take advantage of unprecedented data collection and analytical capacities. Drawing from across the project, the presentation will explore how digital cash assistance has changed geographies of humanitarian aid.

Recommended Readings

CaLP Network. 2023. State of the World's Cash. https://www.calpnetwork.org/collection/the-state-of-the-worlds-cash-2023-report/

Martin, Lauren L, Ruszczyk, Hanna A. 2023. Futures of Humanitarian Aid: Cash Assistance to People on the Move. Durham, UK: Department of Geography. Available at glitchspaces.org, DOI : 10.5281/zenodo.7899487. 

Sandvik, Kristin Bergtora, Maria Gabrielsen Jumbert, John Karlsrud, and Mareile Kaufmann. ‘Humanitarian Technology: A Critical Research Agenda’. International Review of the Red Cross 96, no. 893 (March 2014): 219–42. https://doi.org/10.1017/S1816383114000344.

Squire, Vicki, and Modesta Alozie. ‘Coloniality and Frictions: Data-Driven Humanitarianism in North-Eastern Nigeria and South Sudan’. Big Data & Society 10, no. 1 (1 January 2023): 20539517231163171. https://doi.org/10.1177/20539517231163171.

Tazzioli, Martina. ‘Refugees’ Debit Cards, Subjectivities, and Data Circuits: Financial-Humanitarianism in the Greek Migration Laboratory’. International Political Sociology 13, no. 4 (1 December 2019): 392–408. https://doi.org/10.1093/ips/olz014.