Does unconditional, unrestricted cash assistance improve Syrian refugees’ physical and material wellbeing? -

Abstract

The Syrian crisis is currently in its sixth year, with over one million Syrians still living in Lebanon as refugees. In the context of this protracted crisis, humanitarian actors continuously face resource shortages to secure basic needs for the affected populations. Donors therefore 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 has been claimed to be an appropriate assistance modality by aid providers, to meet refugees’ basic needs, ranging from food, shelter, health and hygiene and other items, in a manner that allows refugee choice to identify spending priorities. In order to assess whether this assumption is correct, this study aims to measure the impact of multipurpose cash assistance delivered by the Lebanon Cash Consortium (LCC) on several proxies of physical and material wellbeing, encompassing food security, health, hygiene and housing. The study uses a quasi-experimental design (i.e. the Regression Discontinuity Design, RDD) to compare indicators of physical and material wellbeing of households that receive cash assistance versus households who do not.The distinctive feature of RDD in this study is that the intervention and the control groups have been formed based on the Proxy Means Test (PMT), which is the indicator used to determine households’ eligibility in the LCC cash program. Without having to randomize the assignment of the intervention - which would be considered unethical in humanitarian programs - 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. In other words, it is expected that they only differ because one group receives the intervention and the other does not. In turn, this allows the establishment and measurement of the causal effect of LCC intervention. The assumption of balance at baseline and midline between the two groups