Today, approximately 866 million people are going hungry — a staggering figure that represented an increase of about 100-200 million from before the pandemic. It’s underdiscussed, but starvation and malnutrition continue to be some of the most pressing humanitarian problems in the world, which two years of a pandemic have only exacerbated.

Historically, agencies like the United Nations’ World Food Programme and the United States Agency for International Development have typically acted to help people at risk of starving by just shipping food — a form of assistance known as “in-kind food aid” — to regions around the world that need it. But the last decade or so has seen an interesting shift. The world’s aid groups, along with governments, have increasingly turned to a different tool to fight hunger: They’ve been giving people money or vouchers.

That shift represents a major change in approach in the field of global development — and a sign of the growing evidence behind the power of cash transfers to help out the world’s poorest.

WFP and USAID’s Bureau for Humanitarian Assistance (BHA), two of the largest aid entities focused on combating hunger, have both greatly increased cash (either direct cash or vouchers that recipients can use to purchase food) as a percentage of their assistance portfolios over the past decade. Cash is now over 30 percent of WFP’s $6.8 billion and USAID’s $4.4 billion recent annual budgets for food assistance.

What we’re seeing from WFP and USAID is just a representative tip of the iceberg for government-sponsored social protection — policies and programs to reduce poverty along different dimensions. While the roughly $11 billion they spend on food assistance sounds like a lot, it’s only 0.3 percent of the more than $3 trillion spent by governments on social protection and labor programs over 2020-2021.

Cash transfers had already been increasingly adopted by governments around the world before the pandemic, and the number of cash transfer programs worldwide almost doubled during the pandemic.

For governments, though, cash transfers are often aimed at multiple levels of well-being. One of the good things about cash is people can choose to spend it on what they need, whether that’s food, a new roof, medicine, or school books. To show the growth of cash transfers as an instrument for fighting hunger, it’s useful to look at programs like WFP or USAID that are specifically meant to keep people fed.

Read the full article about using cash transfers to fight hunger by Siobhan McDonough at Vox.