In early 2022, Ukraine’s Deputy Minister of Social Policy, Kostiantyn Koshelenko, was focused on a multi-year project to modernize how his country delivered government support to citizens. The planned Unified Information System of the Social Sphere (UISSS) would consolidate 15 separate databases into one platform, laying groundwork to create a more harmonized user experience.
Then Russia invaded on February 24, and priorities changed overnight.
The budget for systems development vanished. The number of Ukrainians needing help skyrocketed. And Koshelenko watched as over 100 international humanitarian organizations arrived with their own separate systems for distributing aid and cash—creating a patchwork of parallel processes.
“Initially, recipients appreciated the speed of humanitarian-only systems,” Koshelenko reflected. “But over time, they voiced concerns: Why do I have to register again? Why am I not considered in future programs if I already received aid?”
The cost of fragmentation in payment delivery
In many cases, there is good reason for separation between government and humanitarian delivery.
Humanitarians allocate resources based on need, often focusing on people the government can’t or won’t reach. Independence and neutrality are essential: working directly with a party to the conflict can jeopardize access. For example, partnership with one side might lead to an organization being locked out of regions controlled by the opposing side. Or men fearing conscription may refuse to share data with government-linked programs.
Conversely, governments face their own restrictions. Procurement policies can prevent agencies tasked with social protection delivery from working with non-governmental partners. Data privacy can prevent external access to certain government data or systems.
Yet, Ukraine’s experience shows that when humanitarian and social protection systems operate in parallel, recipients bear the cost through duplication, friction, and inefficiency. Parallel contracts with the same financial service providers prevent economies of scale. Back-office activities become more complex and expensive. Investments by funders are less likely to contribute to longer-term development. And in cases of overlapping programs, recipients are left juggling different cards or accounts to piece together their benefits.
Best practices in social protection increasingly point toward “multi-program” architectures for government payments. These systems gain economies of scale by combining payments from across government – for example, social protection payments, government wages, and subsidies.
However, in countries like Ukraine – facing large humanitarian inflows – government payments are only a piece of the equation. As a result, even the most efficient, coordinated government payment architectures can leave a fragmented experience for recipients who also receive non-governmental aid.
Mauritania’s blueprint: One platform, multiple partners
CGAP’s recent publication, Six Big Ideas: How Financial Services Can Improve Social Protection Delivery, highlights a middle path – where coordinated payment delivery is possible even across the humanitarian and social protection divide.
Mauritania offers a practical example. Twenty-five programs, including those run by humanitarian agencies like Save the Children and Oxfam, have used a national payment platform to cut costs and improve efficiency. By routing payment instructions through the platform, programs can access competitively negotiated rates from financial service providers, reducing transfer fees by up to 40%.
In practice, Mauritania’s model preserves each actor’s autonomy while creating economies of scale. Non-government programs still apply their own targeting criteria. But once payroll ready, non-government agencies send their payment instructions to the national platform, with funds transferred via the same banking channels as for government payments.
Payment data remains siloed to protect recipients and operational independence. Most actors apply a ‘two-track’ approach: while payment delivery primarily uses the national platform (track one, encouraged but not compulsory), they also maintain plans for independent payment processes (track two) in parallel. This means that if national processes are overwhelmed by a crisis, or if concerns emerge over the shared process in the future, humanitarians have the comfort of knowing there is already a contingency on the launching pad.
Mauritania is just one example of how this type of partnership can work in practice. Depending on the starting point for local systems, the needs of recipients, and the constraints of each partner, solutions should be framed with local context in mind. This might mean sharing data to coordinate multiple aspects of support or simply coordinating delivery to achieve payment efficiency.
The key is not in asking one or another partner to compromise their priorities for the sake of coordination – it is a willingness to think creatively about what it means to coordinate. This means concretely determining where coordination does and does not make sense, then working toward improved efficiency while respecting those constraints.
Ukraine – payments as an opportunity for alignment?
Back in 2022, Koshelenko based his work on a simple question: why should families have to register repeatedly and receive their benefits piecemeal?
Three years later, the question remains the same – only now, the story is not solely about government coordination, but coordination between the government and humanitarian agencies as well.
Despite investments in systems like eDopomoga, a solution that offered humanitarian access to national registry data, humanitarians have largely reverted to using their own systems. The divergence of incentives and priorities between humanitarians and the government means that in the third year of war, fragmentation in both registration and payments remains the norm in Ukraine.
Humanitarians in Ukraine need flexibility to target based on acute need. Governments must operate within legal and fiscal boundaries. Yet, as highlighted by the Social Protection for Stability Agenda, fully parallel systems for nearly identical recipients represent a missed opportunity.
Parallel systems are sometimes necessary — but fully parallel payment delivery is rarely optimal. Through investment in shared payment delivery, Ukraine has an opportunity to reduce costs, reduce frictions for recipients, and strengthen systems that will endure long after aid agencies depart.
