UNICEF and partners launch Voucher Fairs
Published May 25th, 2008
United Nations Children Fund (UNICEF) and partner organizations, Catholic Relief Services (CRS), and Norwegian Refugee Council (NRC) have completed a pilot project to study the feasibility of using cash vouchers to deliver humanitarian assistance in eastern DRC. The second series of ‘voucher fairs’ for returning displaced families ended on Friday, May 16 in Butembo. Earlier fairs has been organized in the village of Misugho on May 14, with the first series taking place north of Moba in Katanga province last April.
The fairs differ from UNICEF’s standard distributions of relief supplies to returning displaced families. Instead of receiving a standard, pre-determined package of relief materials, during a fair, the programme participants receive coupons with various monetary values with which they can then ‘purchase’ items of their choice from participating vendors. The vendors travel to the fairgrounds and set up their market stalls to display their wares for sale to the participating families. At the end of the fair the vendors redeem the coupons for cash.
The fair offers beneficiaries the choice to select the household items and supplies that they most need by themselves. It also helps communities recover from displacement and crisis by injecting money directly into the local economy.
Commenting on the fair and its potential use in the DRC, Steven Michel, UNICEF DRC’s acting head of Emergencies noted that: ‘…mobilizing the dynamism of regional markets to deliver assistance has been an emerging trend in humanitarian work. Until now, voucher programs have mostly been associated with assistance to provide seeds and tools… or even in shelter programs such as in Pakistan after the earthquake in 2005 ….. but this is the first major experience using fairs to provide ‘Non-Food’ relief assistance in DRC. It may not be not possible to do this in every location. However, in areas close to large market centers like Butembo, it may prove to be a more appropriate response than standard distributions.’
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