Cash and In-Kind Transfers in Humanitarian Settings : A Review of Evidence and Knowledge Gaps

Over the past decade, humanitarian assistance and social protection have increasingly emergedas a policy response tool to support crisis-affected populations facing conflict or natural disasters. This paperpresents a descriptive literature review of non-contributory humanitarian assistance interventions in low-and-middleincome countries. It uses evidence from twenty-one experimental or quasi-experimental studies to understand theeffects on five outcome categories: (i) basic needs, (ii) financial outcomes, (iii) gender, (iv) human development,and (v) social cohesion. The findings show that gender, human development, and social cohesion are the leastexplored outcomes in humanitarian contexts. Moreover, evidence is scarce on the comparative performance ofdifferent modalities (for example, cash vs. in-kind), targeting mechanisms, cost-effectiveness of alternativeinterventions, heterogeneity analysis, and longer-term effects of interventions. The paper makes the case thatthere is a high dividend to be earned from conducting more impact evaluations in humanitarian settings.