Following the July 2018 earthquake in West Nusa Tenggara and the September 2018 earthquake and tsunami in Central Sulawesi, UNICEF and its partners introduced Multi-purpose Cash Assistance (MPCA) programs as part of their efforts to support recovery in communities. UNICEF commissioned Empatika to understand people's experiences after these disasters, and specifically their perspectives and experiences of the MPC assistance.

For this qualitative assessment our team visited two communities each in Donggala, Palu, and Sigi in Central Sulawesi (May 2019); and two communities in North Lombok in West Nusa Tenggara (July 2019). The insights gathered from the study have helped inform learning for the Cash Working Group and its partners about best practices in MPC assistance during emergencies from the perspectives of beneficiaries.

We used a mix of participatory tools for the study including scoping immersions for context and relationship building; participatory focus group discussions (pFGDs) for exploring the study topics in-depth; and digital storytelling (DST) workshops to help enrich some of the study insights and aid the study partners in promoting continued discussions around the study topics.

During the scoping immersions and pFGDs, our team had in-depth interactions with 216 men and women in these communities, of whom 149 were recipients and 67 were non-recipients of the MPCA. Following this fieldwork, we returned to one community in Sigi and one community in North Lombok in July for conducting DST workshops with a combination of beneficiaries and non-beneficiaries.

The DST workshop in Sigi included 11 mothers along with one grandfather who is the main caregiver for his twin grandchildren. In the North Lombok community, our team conducted two workshops, one in the more central area of the community (five mothers) where we had conducted the pFGDs along with a separate workshop in one of the remote areas of the community (7 mothers) in order to include some women who face significant access issues and who did not receive the MPC assistance. Insights from the finished DST videos are included in the final report, highlighting some of the personal stories as they relate to different study topics.

View the full report or study briefs here.

Some of the key findings from this study included:

• People want cash, although ‘in-kind’ assistance was appreciated right after the disaster before markets resumed normally. Cash expenses, either regular (e.g. gasoline) or additional expenses (as a direct result of disasters like water, cooking utensils) were incurred by families in the first few weeks after the disaster as the immediate assistance provided to most locations was sporadic, unequal and insufficient.
• People prefer receiving cash assistance early on because i. livelihoods were disrupted and families had limited to no earnings to meet expenses, and ii. assistance cash could be used to buy what people needed to fill gaps in external aid.
• People had somewhat limited information about the MPCA programme. Non-recipients of the programme were typically not invited to socialisation sessions nor had clear information about programme plans. Recipients too had limited or unclear information relating to disbursement frequency and dates, and required documentation.
• People thought the house damage criteria for assistance eligibility (as was used in Donggala and Palu) is opaque with levels of damage open to interpretation. Trust in village officials to identify levels of damage correctly was low especially as people were aware of the lack of standard guidelines provided by the government. Targeting based on having young children (targeting mothers of children under 7 years old and pregnant women) seemed to be more accepted.
• People in Central Sulawesi were critical of the programme’s rationale for using bank accounts as a way to encourage financial inclusion. Most people do not have savings and they do not expect to continue using their accounts in the future. Deductions made by the bank (to meet minimum balances) was also an issue of contention.

The study team also plans to return to the two communities in North Lombok once it is safer to do so to share some examples of the final study outputs and to discuss the study process from their perspectives.