The United Nations World Food Programme will soon distribute Mastercard prepaid debit cards, each loaded with $27, to Syrian refugees in Lebanon so they can buy their own food and boost the local economy.
The cards will be reloaded each month with a fresh $27, an amount the World Food Programme determined should be sufficient per person over that amount of time. That money means refugees won't have to wait in line for new paper vouchers every 30 days, and they will no longer be dependent on pre-packaged rations. Instead, they can buy produce at any of the 300 stores across Lebanon that have signed up to participate.
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"They're just more independent that way," Bettina Luescher, World Food Programme's chief spokesperson for North America, told Mashable. "They can get what they would like for their families."
The cards also help tame fraud because they are much easier to track than paper voucher, according to Ann Cairns, Mastercard's president of international markets. When the UN distributes the cards, it also issues an ID that must be used in order to make a purchase with the card.
The goal is to get a card into the hands of each of the 800,000 UN-registered Syrian refugees in Lebanon by the end of the year.
"We know where they are, we know who they are," Luescher said. "It's not as complicated as it might sound."
The World Food Programme has already tested the e-cards with 10,000 people in Nabatiyeh, a Lebanese town. Based on that pilot, Luescher said they are ready to expand, and, if all goes well, they will start distributing cards to the 300,000 Syrian refugees in Jordan by the end of 2013.
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