Executive Summary
Introduction The Syrian crisis is currently in its sixth year, with over one million Syrians still living in Lebanon as refugees. Nearly 60% of all financial resources pledged by UN agencies and INGOs were to secure basic assistance for Syrian refugees, mainly to support them in meeting food and healthcare needs. In the context of this protracted crisis, humanitarian actors continuously face resource shortages to help affected populations meet their basic needs. Therefore, donors look for cost-efficient yet effective solutions, and rely on the available evidence to make their funding decisions. In the Lebanese context, multipurpose cash assistance (MCA) has been used extensively to meet refugees’ basic needs, ranging from food, shelter, health and hygiene and other items, in a manner that allows refugees’ choice of spending priorities.
The Lebanon Cash Consortium (LCC) brings together six international NGOs, including Save the Children (Consortium Lead), the International Rescue Committee (Monitoring, Evaluation, and Research Lead), Solidarités International, CARE, ACTED, and World Vision International. The mandate of the Consortium is to provide MCA to economically vulnerable Syrian households, whose eligibility is determined based on the inter-agency Proxy Means Test (PMT) score that seeks to measure economic vulnerability. During 2015, 20,000 household had been assisted with MCA out of 25,000 that were found eligible for MCA. The remaining 5,000 were not enrolled in the MCA program reportedly due to lack of funding. This study aims to measure the impact of the MCA delivered by LCC at a six-month midline of assistance on several proxies of physical and material wellbeing, encompassing food security, health, hygiene and housing.
Methodology
The study uses a quasi-experimental design called Regression Discontinuity Design (RDD) to compare indicators of the physical and material wellbeing of households that receive cash assistance versus households who do not. The RDD shares similarities to Randomized Controlled Trials (RCT) and can establish the causal effect of an intervention. The key difference between RDD and RCT lays in the modality of forming the two groups to be compared.
Without having to randomize those who will receive or not receive cash assistance, which is considered unethical in humanitarian programs, in this RDD study the intervention and control households have been chosen in proximity of the PMT cutoff point. Hence, they are supposedly similar from a socio-economic and demographic perspective, as if they were randomly chosen. The only difference that is assumed between them is in the receipt of cash assistance. In turn, this allows establishing and measuring the causal effect of LCC intervention.
The study compared a group of 247 recipient- and 261 non-recipient households, most of which are male-headed households (76% recipient and 77% non-recipient), with an average age of around 39 years old. Households in the two groups were found very similar, except for the fact that non-recipient households possessed a greater variety of basic household assets, had smaller size and received a lower amount of cash assistance from sources other than the LCC.
