3.1. Trailer for CashCast series three - 'Making change happen'

A new season of CashCast is on its way 🎉. Join us for a fresh episode each week over the next five weeks, as our host interviews a wide range of guests.

Together, we’ll dive into how change unfolds in the humanitarian sphere, with a special focus on cash and voucher assistance.

Check out this trailer for a sneak peek of what’s in store—we hope you’ll be listening!

Series guests:

• Irfan Khan: Director of Humanitarian and International Partnerships at Muslim Hands 
• Anna Kondakhchyan: Head of Cash and Markets at NORCAP/Norwegian Refugee Council 
• Oliver May: Consultant on risk in the humanitarian and development sector 
• Sindhy Obias: Executive Director of the Assistance and Cooperation for Community Resilience and Development (ACCORD) 
• Dr. Kathryn Taetzsch: World Vision International's Senior Director, Global Humanitarian and Development Capacity and Capabilities 
• Lydiah Wangechi: Regional Director at GiveDirectly 

Series host: 

• Karen Peachey: Former Director of the CALP Network.

Series episodes:

3.2. How do we make change happen?
3.3: How to turn an idea into reality? 3 Ps: Policies, processes, and partnerships 
3.4: Money Matters! Funding for CVA.
3.5: Risk: it’s inevitable – so what do we do about it?
3.6:   Scaling-up the use of CVA

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Transcript

Karen: Hi, I’m Karen Peachy your host for the series of CALP’s podcast, ‘CashCast’.

In this series, we’re asking: What doea it take to make change happen in the humanitarian world, especially when it comes to cash and voucher assistance?

We heard the views of 6 wonderful guests over 5 episodes. Here are some highlights from our conversations:

Anna: What I also observed at the time and have since come to recognize as an important part of change making is that none of these practitioners were sitting around waiting for permission from senior leaders.

Karen: That was Anna Kondakhchyan from NORCAP of the Norwegian Refugee Council, who has worked with many agencies to increase the use cash transfers. She told some interesting stories about the fight for cash, and the lessons we can learn.    

We also spoke to Oliver May, who offered valuable insights from his 20 years of experience in the humanitarian and development sector helping organisations tackle strategy, governance and risk.  

Oliver: So what we can do is start at the bottom, work up or start in the middle and work outwards, what can we change and influence in our own spheres? Who can we collaborate with? How can we push the dial? How can we generate change within our organisations?

 Karen: Dr Kathryn Taetzsch from World Vision joined us, sharing wisdom gained from her extensive experience of working with International NGOs and other agencies to maximise the use of cash and voucher assistance.

Kathryn: I think it always starts with mindset. Many organizations that have been for a long time in this field, right, have developed certain routines, that have proven to be really solid and from a, let's say, sector and standard perspective, really impactful over time. However, context change, right? ... So overcoming mindsets that are probably very linear very often in our sector still, is one key challenge

Karen: We heard from Lydiah Wangechi, from GiveDirectly, a relatively new international organisation and one which started out as a proponent of cash and didn't have to make the transition from in-kind assistance.  

Lydiah: I think for GiveDirectly, the evidence probably was the strongest asset in the sense that, you know, people can argue philosophically about many things, but when you present evidence, you know, it’s hard to push back on numbers and evidence, and especially if it’s a rigorous study that has been done. So, I think that’s … probably what has helped, especially with the institution funders and also with governments.

Karen: We also heard from Sindhy Obias, who leads Accord, an organisation from the Philippines who spoke to what change looks like in practice for a national organization.

Sindhy: It's always a strategy that at the very least we coordinate our actions with the local governments. But at the highest objective of that, is that we try to influence the local governments in terms of policies, in terms of planning, so that they are better able to provide services to the people ... 

Karen: And finally, we spoke to Irfan Khan of Muslim Hands, a large international NGO, who shared some interesting thoughts about the some of the challenges they faced.

Irfan: Whereas on the banking side, the banks are getting very risk averse as well when it comes to dealing with the charities altogether. There’s a lot of questions that we get asked and they want to see the project documents in that case as well and they want to see you know what program that we have got in place for against the funding that we are transferring.

Karen: I hope that gives you a flavour of what to expect from the next five episodes. So, tune into this series of CashCast – we think you’ll go away feeling inspired by our guests’ insights and examples about how humanitarian system change really happens.

Thanks for listening, and goodbye for now.