Sustaining Yemeni Capacities for Social Assistance: Lessons from a Decade of War

Yemen has sometimes been held up as an impressive example of how existing social protection systems and capacities can be maintained and supported even during a prolonged war. While providing support to meet immediate life-saving needs is the humanitarian priority in Yemen, aid organisations also want to ensure that recurrent emergency operations are delivered in a way that will support, and not undermine, national reconstruction and rehabilitation for a post-conflict Yemen.

Through a literature review and interviews with Yemeni and international stakeholders conducted in 2022 and 2023, this study has interrogated that narrative, examining the evidence on what capacities are being supported, and what that means for the effective provision of assistance through a protracted crisis. It is important to acknowledge the enormous challenges all actors in Yemen must confront in trying to find ways to help people survive in the face of conflict and other shocks. Widespread conflict, insecurity, and contested governance have made providing assistance extremely hard. The huge scale of need has also necessitated one of the biggest aid operations in the world, creating incentives for control and diversion.

In the face of these challenges, focusing on the two main social assistance operations in Yemen – the World Food Programme’s General Food Assistance Programme and the World Bank’s Unconditional Cash Transfer Programme (implemented by the United Nations Children’s Fund and the Social Fund for Development, with the Social Welfare Fund) – this study has found impressive achievements in getting assistance to people, and in maintaining and strengthening Yemeni organisational and individual capacities. However, while some capacities have been maintained and built, others have been relatively neglected (in particular, valuable capacities for community engagement and accountability, which are vital for achieving more inclusive and conflict-sensitive approaches), whereas others (around the highly politicised issues of targeting and transfer value) have been difficult to tackle.

The study found that partnerships with Yemeni non-governmental organisations are narrowly subcontractual and limited to managing distribution, with only a small proportion of funding directly reaching national organisations. Overall, the process of providing external support for ‘capacity strengthening’ of national actors is somewhat opaque. More coordinated strategic efforts to support local capacities, informed by shared analysis and learning from past endeavours, could help improve future social assistance interventions.