Vocabulary used across humanitarian cash programming and social protection.
- Cash and Voucher Assistance (CVA)
- The direct provision of cash transfers or vouchers for goods and services to people in need. It is the sector term that replaced CTP and CBI.
- Restricted transfer
- A transfer that limits what assistance can be used for, or where. Restriction is about use; it is different from conditionality, which is about qualifying.
- Conditionality
- A requirement that a recipient perform an activity to qualify for assistance. It is routinely confused with restriction, which limits how assistance is spent.
- Value voucher
- A voucher denominated in currency and redeemable against a range of goods. Its purchasing power moves with prices.
- Commodity voucher
- A voucher redeemable for a fixed list of goods. CALP treats it as closer to in-kind assistance than to cash.
- Multipurpose Cash Assistance (MPCA)
- A transfer sized to cover multiple basic needs and unrestricted by definition. That is why a multipurpose voucher cannot exist.
- Minimum Expenditure Basket (MEB)
- A costed basket of what a household needs in a given context. It is the standard reference for sizing a multipurpose cash transfer.
- Government-to-Person (G2P) payments
- Transfers made by the state directly to individuals. The challenge is reach, not moving money.
- Social registry
- The government database of households used to determine eligibility for social programmes. It sits upstream of payment in the delivery chain.
- Beneficiary deduplication
- Ensuring one household is not assisted twice. Within an organisation it is an architecture question; between organisations it is a governance question.
- Financial Service Provider (FSP)
- The institution that actually moves money in an assistance programme. Confusing it with the control platform is a procurement error.
- Merchant whitelist
- The vetted list of merchants permitted to receive programme funds, checked before value moves rather than at reconciliation.
- Flash-call authorisation
- Confirmation by an unanswered incoming call whose last four digits are the code. At programme scale it costs less than SMS.
- Receipt capture
- A beneficiary-submitted photograph filed against an already-authorised transaction. It corroborates the record rather than being the record.
- Instant merchant settlement
- Payment reaching the merchant at the moment of sale, with no register of redeemed vouchers to assemble and submit first.
