The VenEsperanza Emergency Response Consortium (VE) was established in 2019 to provide a joint response to the Venezuelan migrant crisis in Colombia. The consortium comprises the International Rescue Committee (IRC), Mercy Corps (MC), Save the Children (SC), and World Vision (WV), with MC acting as consortium lead. The program was financed by USAID’s Bureau for Humanitarian Assistance (BHA) and the phaseunder review ran from August 2019 until December 2022.
The VE program provides emergency multipurpose cash assistance (MPCA) to Venezuelan migrant families to cover their basic needs. Up to 30% of participants in each area of intervention can be vulnerable Colombians who are part of the host communities.
Between August 2019 and March 2022, the program provided MPCA to 100,407 households for a duration of six months (six transfers) in 12 departments. The total expenditures over that period reached $70,419,721(the total budget of the program is $93,130,000), with $45,131,469 of MPCA transferred to households. The details of the program are summarized in Table 1.
In addition to the MPCA, the program has a complementary nutrition component (implemented by SC and WV) and a registration component to support migrants in the pre-registration process for the Temporary Statute of Protection for Venezuelan Migrants (ETPV in Spanish), a temporary protection permit. Lastly, VE has implemented a Caminantes strategy to pre-register Venezuelan migrants that travel on foot to facilitate the application of the assistance once they arrive at their destination.
VE has commissioned a Value for Money (VfM) study to assess the programmatic value of the MPCA program in Colombia.
The report looks at three aspects of VfM:
- The cost-efficiency of the intervention, analyzing the performance of the program in terms of costs and the equitable allocation of resources;
- The cost structure and drivers of the program;
- The effectiveness and extent to which the program objectives have been attained equitably.