Value For Money of Social Assistance in FCAS: Considerations, Evidence, and Research Priorities

Value for Money (VfM) is an essential tool for balancing difficult policy and programme decisions and the trade-offs between the ‘5 Es’ of economy, efficiency, effectiveness, cost-effectiveness, and equity. While many of the conceptual approaches to VfM and methods for estimation are similar in regular development programming for social protection and humanitarian cash and food assistance, these literatures have so far evolved in fairly distinct silos. There has been relatively little work so far to bring the two strands together. In fragile and conflict-affected settings, the gaps are especially great. A lack of cost and basic programme implementation data hinders understanding of economy and efficiency, while gaps in robust evidence on outcomes and impacts further impede an analysis of effectiveness and, crucially, the trade-offs between the ‘5Es’. The research agenda presented here emphasises the need to build the evidence base on both costs and benefits, and to use it more intentionally for better adaptive management of programmes and policy support.