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In 2024, cash and voucher assistance represented about a third (USD 358.7 million) of the humanitarian response in Lebanon. This is nearly double the global average of 17.8 percent in the same year and reflects the recognition that cash, whenever feasible, is a more effective, efficient and accountable form of aid. While cash assistance has made inroads as a modality of assistance, the potential of cash as a transformational force to transfer decision-making power into the hands of affected populations and enable the participation revolution has not been fully achieved. While unrestricted cash gives recipients choice on how to spend assistance, making it a more dignified way of helping crisis-affected people, the decisions regarding the design of cash programs (on elements such as transfer values and selection criteria) remain firmly in the hands of aid providers.
The Services and Assistance for Enabling Recovery (SAFER) program by Mercy Corps is a people-centric cash program, designed in collaboration with affected communities in the Bekaa Valley. Following a series of community consultations in September 2023, the program introduced changes to its outreach and registration system and targeting approach compared to its previous iterations. The user journeys of program participants provide a firsthand account of what it feels like to be on the receiving end of SAFER assistance. They take the pulse of SAFER accountability efforts, celebrate its participation progress and highlight areas for continuous improvement.
The SAFER user journeys revealed the following key trends:
Clear Criteria Improve Outcomes
• There is no such thing as the perfect targeting system. Every targeting approach suffers from inclusion and exclusion errors. The choice is between approaches that offer different levels of transparency and agency.
• SAFER’s use of simple, observable criteria (e.g. young children, disabilities) reduced confusion.
• Transparency on selection criteria improves reach, by encouraging targeted families to register for the program.
• This contrasts with proxy means test-based systems where eligibility is perceived as opaque by affected populations, creating perceptions of randomness or favoritism.
Transparency Enables Agency
• SAFER participants had a clear understanding of why they were selected, the transfer value they would receive, and the duration of assistance.
• This transparency allowed participants to plan ahead, reducing the risk of financial hardship when assistance ends.
• Transparent eligibility communication prevented false expectations, improving trust and community relations.
Mutual aid and social cohesion
• Many SAFER participants valued breadth over depth of cash assistance—preferring smaller transfer values for more people. According to an Arabic saying, a running spring is better than a dry river.
• Yet, there are limits to the extent to which mutual aid takes precedence over an individual’s needs.
• Calibrating the transfer value of cash assistance in the context of widespread poverty and limited funding is an artful balancing act between these forces, rather than an exact science
Emergency Response Approaches
• During the 2024 hostilities, horizontal expansion (reaching unassisted families) was favored by most actors, unlike Mercy Corps, which adopted a vertical expansion (top-up to existing recipients).
• Cash actors using de-duplication with MOSA delayed responses but ensured assistance reached newly affected families.
Elderly People Risk Exclusion
• Hussein’s user journey sheds light on the experience of marginalized groups such as the elderly, that are often invisible to aid systems, are not mobile and remain at home or hidden.
• Elderly participants require proactive, accessible support systems to ensure inclusion.
The experience of SAFER program participants is relevant for the continuous improvement of Mercy Corps’ accountability systems. The result is a demand-driven aid program that empowers participants to be agents of change and combats the charity paradigm of humanitarian assistance. However, the evolving context has put SAFER systems to the test and areas for a more accountable SAFER response have emerged. The stories told in SAFER user journeys are also relevant for policy makers and providers of humanitarian aid and social assistance in so far as they reveal notions of transparency and equity among the affected populations that those programs are meant to assist. This report shows how the perspectives of affected populations can translate into policy recommendations to strengthen existing social protection systems in Lebanon. In particular, it discusses the implications of the design choices on some of the existing social protection programs on the social contract in Lebanon.
By Safer Team, Mercy Corps Lebanon
