This year’s annual Research Review brings you updates on our global research activities in 2018 including trends over time, with a deep dive on how we design and implement research to improve the effectiveness of our humanitarian assistance.
For almost 40 years, Action Against Hunger has been at the forefront of the fight against hunger worldwide. Our organisation has an established reputation for evidence-based action, with a proven track record of providing high-quality technical and operational support, even in the most challenging contexts.
Research is critical to the organisation in assessing and improving the effectiveness, scalability, and sustainability of our actions; of learning how to respond better and faster to the needs and vulnerabilities of people affected by emergencies, especially in times of crisis; and of leveraging evidence-based advocacy to produce the change we want to see in the world.
Action Against Hunger’s Research Strategy for 2016–2020 outlines three priority workstreams for our organisation’s research activities. This focuses our expertise and capacity to address critical gaps in the evidence base where we expect to contribute to tangible improvements in policy and practice.
These research workstreams are:
Prevention of undernutrition: understanding and addressing the causes of hunger;
Treatment of undernutrition: managing and mitigating the consequences of undernutrition;
Effectiveness of humanitarian assistance and emergency response: encouraging preparedness, improving reactivity and a higher quality of response.
In 2017, Action Against Hunger published our first ever Research Review to provide an overview of the status of research conducted by our organisation. Not only did this report highlight the breadth of exciting research that we are leading globally but also its strong programmatic and operational links.
Our research is designed as an integral part of our operations and with the explicit aim of generating evidence that will inform programme design and implementation. By focusing on learning and improvement via our research activities, we aim to increase our impact – reaching higher numbers of vulnerable people with safer and more effective interventions than we could have done before.
In this year’s annual Research Review, we are bringing you updates on our global research activities in 2018 including trends over time, as well as casting a lens on the third workstream of our research strategy – how we design and implement research in humanitarian and emergency contexts to improve the effectiveness of our assistance programmes. Our aim for this year’s edition is to highlight where and how Action Against Hunger is leading research efforts in this challenging space, with examples of what we’ve done and what we’ve learned, particularly in those cases where the results of our research were contrary to the proposed hypothesis.