The role and scale of cash and voucher assistance (CVA) in global humanitarian response have expanded dramatically over the last 15 years, with advocates arguing it offers greater economic efficiency, enabling humanitarian actors to do more with less throughout all phases of a crisis, from preparedness to emergency response to recovery.  

Ensuring CVA is implemented wherever feasible and desired by communities is an important consideration, but monitoring markets on a local level is needed to ensure that the aid remains relevant in each context. Why?

• To ensure that markets in our target areas are sufficiently functional and that the basic conditions are in place for CVA to be effective.
• To track item availability, ensuring that households have access to the basic goods they need to survive, and that thus they can use cash to acquire them. 
• To monitor prices and quantify household financial burdens, showing how much aid an average local household needs to survive. 
• To understand these financial burdens and thus dynamically update standard cash transfer values, helping us to insulate households from the economic instability that accompanies many humanitarian crises.
  

Market in Sudan

To understand these different factors, IMPACT (through its initiative REACH) developed the Joint Market Monitoring Initiative (JMMI), which brings together CVA actors to collaboratively provide an entire response with key data on market prices and functionality needed to design CVA programming.   

To provide a comprehensive overview of this approach and methodology for external audiences, REACH has now published a JMMI Global Guidance Note, bringing together more than 10 years of experience designing, implementing, and refining JMMIs.

JMMI Assessment in Ethiopia

Providing a comprehensive overview of all stages of the JMMI cycle from assessment and tool design, through data collection and cleaning, all the way through analysis, interpretation, and dissemination of results, the JMMI Global Guidance Note aims to make the methodology more transparent and enable Cash Working Groups to launch JMMIs in more diverse contexts. 

In the global context of rising needs and declining funding, ensuring that humanitarian assistance is effective and aligned with communities’ wishes is crucial, and in many contexts, CVA is a strong way forward – and these guidelines aim to lay the groundwork for partners wishing to go in that direction.   

Access the Global Guidance Note to find detailed information about the JMMI,  or read our brief for a short summary.