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Humanitarian Cash Transfer Systems as Parallel Social Protection
Humanitarian cash transfer systems provide cash or voucher assistance to crisis-affected populations, including refugees and IDPs. They often use humanitarian targeting, payment providers, beneficiary databases, complaints systems, and donor-funded programme cycles.
Why it matters: Humanitarian cash is one of the most practical interfaces between emergency response and social protection. The political economy archetype is parallel assistance with alignment potential: it can either reinforce humanitarian residualism or help build pathways into ordinary systems. The 2025 collapse of US and other bilateral humanitarian funding, visible concretely in the Thailand-Myanmar border case elsewhere in this dataset, is a live stress test of this archetype: donor-funded parallel cash systems that never built alignment pathways into national systems have proven abruptly reversible.
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