Sail Through the Storms with Cash Transfer: Survivor’s Stories of Cash and Vouchers Assistance in Indonesia During Disasters and Covid-19

In disaster and humanitarian crisis settings, if designed deliberatively, cash transfer programmes can buy out some freedoms for the survivors. Governments can help by scaling up and targeting broader coverage. Despite being smaller in scale, NGOs’ cash transfer programmes often come in a package that involves participation and empowerment. This book presents twenty-five lived stories and experiences from disaster survivors in Central Sulawesi and Lombok Island who have been affected by devastating earthquakes in 2018 and further exacerbated by Covid-19. The survivors include beneficiaries, local businesses, and local NGO staff. Each story provided in part 2 can be seen as a standalone story—where each story represents the everyday life of surviving disasters and Covid-19.
The stories are narrated by empowered survivors. The narrators include the beneficiaries, the local vendors, and the field staff of the humanitarian cash transfer programme from Wahana Visi Indonesia, one of the largest humanitarian organisations in Indonesia. Below are two snippets of stories from disaster survivors. These stories are not directly linked to the technical process of cash and voucher distribution after disasters. NGOs, governments, and academics alike often ignore these stories. We would like to present the survivors’ experiences in their everyday context, which might be boring for some.