Cash for Work recipients awaiting payment. Daikaina, Tillabery. Heather Dolphin
benefit with smaller proportions of CRS’ assistance. In one community,
for every household selected, a neighbor’s household was assigned who
would also work on the site and receive half of the payment. In another
community, the cash is equally distributed among all residents. More
investigation is needed into the targeting method used in the other
villages and participants’ level of satisfaction with it.
While this is important to understand better, it is also worthwhile noting
that support to the community’s own self-help mechanisms is important
in promoting community resiliency. The SPHERE standards recognize
self-help as a cross-cutting theme for humanitarian sector interventions
to bear in mind:
“Community-led initiatives contribute to psychological and
social well-being through restoring dignity and a degree of
control to disaster-affected populations. Access to social and
financial (…) support through (…) community activities helps
to re-establish individual and community self-respect and
identity, decrease vulnerability and enhance resilience.”6
This finding should be used to communicate and advocate at all levels
the difficulty that short term emergency initiatives face in achieving their
intended results.
6 The SPHERE Project, Humanitarian Charter and Minimum Standards in Humanitarian
Response, 2011 Edition. P. 56
3