Humanitarian agencies test donating before disasters – 07/10/2023 – Environment

Natural disasters can plunge the world’s poorest people into even deeper poverty. Now humanitarian agencies are trying something new. They are handing out small amounts of cash to people just before disaster strikes rather than waiting until after.

These trials are still in their infancy, and there is little research on their effectiveness. But there are already signs that they can help people protect themselves and their assets in ways they could not have done before.

This approach has already been tried in several different situations: before a cyclone hit Mozambique in March, before a hurricane brought torrential rain in Central America last October, and now to help people move from the slopes of Mount Elgon, in Uganda prone to landslides.

The reason why these one-time payments, known as cash advance relief, matter now is that natural disasters are looming large due to human-induced climate change. And they often hurt the world’s poorest populations most severely.

When crops or properties are not covered by insurance, sudden disasters such as floods, for example, or slowly occurring catastrophes, such as droughts, can have a devastating effect. People can lose their only livelihood, their land, and their only assets, their livestock.

Consider what happened when the World Food Program sent $50 per household to 23,000 families living on the banks of the Jamuna River in Bangladesh, days before the region was predicted to be hit by extreme flooding in July 2020.

People who received the money were less likely to “go a day without food” during the floods compared to people who didn’t, as an independent review by researchers at the University of Oxford and the Center for Disaster Protection revealed. funded by the British Aid Agency.

Even more surprising, even three months later, the researchers found that those who received the money were eating better, less likely to have sold their livestock or to have taken out high-interest loans.

Cash aid as a general anti-poverty tool has also brought surprising gains. A recent global study of 7 million people in 37 countries found that giving money directly to poor people resulted in fewer women and children dying.

Another study found that cash aid prevented food insecurity in some parts of southern Africa nearly 20 years ago, but not in others, where food prices soared.

In the United States, cash assistance given to mothers in the first year of their children’s lives has strengthened their babies’ brain development. Dozens of American cities have pilot projects to give money to poor residents, without imposing conditions on the benefit.

Now there is the added pressure of extreme weather conditions, both fast and slow, compounded by the burning of coal, oil and gas. Proponents of cash aid say it’s a more effective way to use relief money because cash involves less logistical expense and is funneled directly into the local economy.

“Cash transfers help families survive climate disasters,” said Miriam Laker-Oketta, director of research at charity GiveDirectly, which does just that — it gives directly. “Money enables choices and reaches aid recipients quickly.”

Skeptics see these grants as a band-aid solution that is no match for the collection of dangers facing the poor in the Global South: deadly heat, rising sea levels, erratic rainfall. Not everyone who needs it will receive money.

“It is not sustainable”, opined Wanjira Mathai, manager at the NGO WRI (World Resources Institute). “There will always be a limitation in terms of where that money comes from.”

Cash payments are being experimented with with increasing frequency in different places. The International Red Cross and Red Crescent Movement gave money to shepherds in Mongolia during periods of bitter cold and to families in Guatemala and Honduras shortly before Hurricane Julia caused catastrophic flooding last October.

The World Food Program has provided money not only before a sudden disaster but also, in Ethiopia, long before the onset of a prolonged drought.

People used the money to buy food, pay off loans and, when they were also given drought forecasts, to buy food and medicine for their livestock, the agency concluded in its own analysis.

The Laker-Oketta group has been working with villages in Malawi, which have also been hit hard by drought in recent years. Last year, he sent two payments of US$400 (R$1,948 at current exchange rates) to the families.

In a village in the south of the country, Chipyali, the head of the village, Khadija William, bought a small solar panel that allowed her to install a light and a fan in her house. Suwema Gray bought five goats with her money.

And Margaret Daiton built a house of brick and tin to take the place of the old house, made of mud and thatch that leaked every year in the rainy season. But the money wasn’t enough for her to buy wood for the door. She spent what was left of the amount received on food.

Even without a door, Daiton was relieved to have finished building her house before the torrential rains that came this year with Cyclone Freddy. “The old house would have been completely destroyed,” she said.

But the limitations of cash assistance were also in full view in Chipyali. Some people who spent their money buying expensive hybrid seeds and chemical fertilizers, as they were advised to do, lost everything. The rains washed away everything they had planted.

_{Translated by Clara Allain}