The Syrian crisis is currently in its sixth year, with over one million Syrians still living in Lebanon as refugees. Nearly 60% of all financial resources pledged by UN agencies and INGOs were to secure basic assistance for Syrian refugees, mainly to support them in meeting food and healthcare needs. In the context of this protracted crisis, humanitarian actors continuously face resource shortages to help affected populations meet their basic needs. Therefore, donors 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 (MCA) has been used extensively to meet refugees’ basic needs, ranging from food, shelter, health and hygiene and other items, in a manner that allows refugees’ choice of 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.
