Group Cash Transfers in Kharkiv

finished

Frontline communities in Ukraine continue to suffer significant losses in 2025 due to ongoing shelling, population displacement, and the destruction of infrastructure. At the same time, it is the local actors — community groups, parishes, volunteer initiatives, and local Caritas organizations — who remain closest to affected people and continue providing essential support such as evacuation, heating and shelter spaces, psychological assistance, and distribution of humanitarian goods. However, these local structures often lack their own financial resources to sustain critical services or cover operational costs. Traditional grant mechanisms are typically too complex and time-consuming in the phases of needs assessment and proposal development. Group Cash Transfers (GCTs) are therefore proposed as a flexible funding modality to strengthen local structures, enabling timely response and continuity of humanitarian services in frontline and high-risk areas. Within this framework, GCTs are positioned as an enabling mechanism of the Humanitarian Needs and Response Plan (HNRP) priorities — particularly to support the most vulnerable near the frontline, to facilitate evacuations and after-strike responses, and to sustain safe spaces and collective centers. The modality allows parishes and local Caritas offices to activate contingency and response plans immediately, ensuring continuity of essential community services.

The objective of the project is to strengthen the emergency preparedness and response capacities of community structures through a flexible micro-grant mechanism provided to groups instead of individuals that enables the community structures to provide rapid assistance to vulnerable groups and continuity of essential humanitarian services in frontline oblasts.

Group Cash Transfers
The Group Cash Transfer (GCT) approach seeks to transfer decision-making power and agency to affected communities (typically delimited by geographical location) or community groups to enable them to better respond to their own needs and priorities. The primary transfer modality for GCTs is cash transfers for selected groups to implement projects that benefit a sub-section of the affected population, or the members of the supported groups and their families, depending on the context of implementation.

Support to the community structures will help to cover a number of areas, which will be determined by the community structures depending on need. The support can include:

• Multi-Purpose Cash Assistance (MPC): Providing support to conflict affected vulnerable households
• Evacuation Support: Supporting evacuations for civilians to transit centers or safe locations
• Shelter and Non-Food Items: Provide support for people who were evacuated in terms of providing heating or blankets in transit shelters or cover other shelter related needs

Since the Group Cash Transfer mechanism is grounded in local contingency and emergency response plans, this pilot will also contribute to the standardization of contingency planning tools and preparedness arrangements, ensuring alignment with cluster guidance, sub-national coordination mechanisms, and the relevant local authorities’ standards.