Can Digital Aid Deliver During Humanitarian Crises?
通过实验评估阿富汗极端贫困女性户主家庭的数字支付援助，发现其显著改善粮食安全和心理健康，成本低于世界粮食计划署的现金转移，且未发现资金挪用。
Can digital payments help reduce extreme hunger? Humanitarian needs are at their highest since 1945, aid budgets are falling behind, and hunger is concentrating in fragile states where repression and aid diversion present major obstacles. In such contexts, partnering directly with governments is often neither feasible nor desirable, making private digital payment platforms a potentially useful means of delivering assistance. We experimentally evaluated digital payments to extremely poor, female-headed households in Afghanistan, as part of a partnership between community, nonprofit, and private organizations. The payments led to substantial improvements in food security and mental well-being. Despite beneficiaries’ limited tech literacy, 99.75% used the payments, and stringent checks revealed no evidence of diversion. Before seeing our results, policymakers and experts are uncertain and skeptical about digital aid, consistent with the lack of prior evidence on digital payments for humanitarian response. Delivery costs are under 7 cents per dollar, which is 10 cents per dollar less than the World Food Programme’s global figure for cash-based transfers. These savings can help reduce hunger without additional resources, demonstrating how hybrid partnerships utilizing digital payment platforms can help address grand challenges in difficult contexts. This paper was accepted by Caroline Flammer, sustainability. Funding: Research funding was provided by the UK Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office, awarded through the J-PAL Crime and Violence Initiative. Supplemental Material: The online appendix and data files are available at https://doi.org/10.1287/mnsc.2024.06469 .