Dear friends,
August capped in Cap-Haïtien for us. Officials from the Government of Haiti, Alliance members and two Support Mechanism members spent four days there finalising a plan to bring the country’s separate cash transfer initiatives under a single national programme. The target is 100,000 households across five of the most vulnerable departments. It builds on several cash transfer initiatives funded by the Inter-American Development Bank (IDB), the World Food Programme and the World Bank, and sits inside the Politique nationale de protection et de promotion sociales. The plan also sets out how the social registry has to be strengthened and expanded, a condition for its sustainability.
Around 5.8 million Haitians face acute food insecurity and up to 1.5 million are internally displaced. Several initiatives already run in parallel, with different actors pursuing similar goals. The Ministry of Social Affairs and Labour, with the Economic and Social Assistance Fund, is mapping which of them overlap and which can converge. Funding from Brazil, the IDB and the World Bank is emerging from the Alliance process, on top of the package pledged at the First Leaders’ Meeting in November 2025.
Lucny Cadet, the Ministry’s coordinator, describes the challenge as establishing a priority programme that can attract financing, move quickly into implementation, and be embedded in national social protection institutions and systems. The successful mission last week is a significant step in the direction of that goal.
Fittingly, this edition’s two Policy Basket highlights are also about targeted transfers, in this case focusing at creating resilience to climate-related food crises. Kenya’s Hunger Safety Net Programme has delivered unconditional transfers to roughly 100,000 households in the Arid and Semi-Arid Lands since 2009. Payments go out on biometric cards through point-of-sale devices, a workaround for remote geography and households that move. The registration system can scale to a further 250,000 households when drought hits.
The programme is now moving to full Government of Kenya ownership and financing, with a US$250 million IDA operation behind its extension into new counties. These are the same lands as Maji Plus, pairing low cost rainwater harvesting solutions like cisterns and community mobilization to enable school meals and water access for students in 1400 schools. Brazil’s Ministry of Social Development brought that pairing of water access and social protection to UNCCD’s COP17 in Ulaanbaatar in August, where its session on resilience to desertification drew on Brazil’s Cisterns Programme, which is being currently studied by Kenya in a knowledge exchange partnership brokered by the Support Mechanism of the Alliance.
Paraguay’s PROEZA attaches the transfer to a different condition. It is the country’s first attempt at its Nationally Determined Contributions through the Green Climate Fund. Households registered in Tekoporã receive environmentally conditioned cash transfers, agroforestry support and efficient “Tata Piriri” cookstoves across eight departments. The budget is USD 90.3 million, USD 65.2 million of it national public money, and the design reaches 153,000 people living in poverty.
One thing to look forward to in the next couple months from the Alliance and the drive to keep the fight against hunger and poverty as a global priority: on 23 September, Brazil and Spain convene “Four Years Left” at UN Headquarters during the General Assembly high-level week, on how country-led systems and financing can be scaled to accelerate and safeguard SDG 1 and 2 gains and prevent their reversal in the face of predictable impacts in the wake of conflicts, trade disruption, and a super El Niño.
Also to look for: the Alliance’s Board of Champions meets for the fourth time in Rome on 16 October, and Ethiopia and partners are putting final touches on a groundbreaking Implementation Roadmap for its Yelemat Tirufat programme, one of the first country planning and matchmaking processes initiated under the Alliance approach to approach maturity.
All the best,
Renato D. Godinho
Director, Global Alliance Against Hunger and Poverty
Support Mechanism
