Nafa Quick, the COVID-19 cash transfer carved out of the Nafa programme
The Gambia's government had its new social safety net project restructured within three months of the pandemic (restructuring dated 9 June 2020) to create Nafa Quick, which between July and October 2020 paid two transfers of GMD 3,000 to 78,359 rural households in 30 districts, against a target of 60,000, with all payments made before the end of the lean season.
78,359 households, households benefiting from the temporary nafa quick intervention (oi 2.1), 2020-10. 100 %, share of nafa quick payments made before the end of the lean season (ir 2.1), 2020-10. World Bank, Implementation Completion and Results Report, The Gambia Social Safety Net Project (P167260), June 2024, retrieved 2026-10-02.
The move, and what it needed
The government asked the World Bank to repurpose its freshly started safety net project, and the project unit ran a separate, simple rural cash transfer, two payments timed to the lean season, through community targeting in 30 districts while the social registry and the regular programme were still being built.
Preconditions
- An externally financed safety net project already effective, with money that could be reallocated
- A project unit and community structures able to list households without a registry
- Willingness to sacrifice the duration of the long-term programme to pay for the emergency one
Where else it has been used: Like hnd-cct-shock-response and cog-lisungi-covid, a donor project became the shock-response channel; The Gambia's case shows the cost explicitly, because the regular programme was cut to fund it.
Limits: The World Bank financed the project and rates its own efficacy High; the figures are in the plain-text ICR: the June 2020 restructuring on page 9 (paragraph 17), the 78,359 households and the 100 percent lean-season indicator in Table 2 on page 14 (paragraph 34), and 'restructured in three months' with the July to October 2020 payment window on page 24 (paragraph 70). The ICR says Nafa Quick ran before the delivery system existed, so no socio-economic data were collected on its beneficiaries and its targeting of the poor cannot be assessed. The speed was bought by cutting the longer-term programme: the extreme-poor Nafa transfer was halved from 36 to 18 months to pay for Nafa Quick, and the additional financing meant to restore it was not approved because a COVID-19 waiver expired first, so the remaining 18 months were deferred until a new project, The Gambia RISE (approved February 2024), began paying them from July 2024 (page 24, paragraph 69). Two payments of GMD 3,000 is a small, temporary transfer. The money came from an existing IDA project, not from the national budget.