Can rigorous impact evaluations improve humanitarian assistance?

Assessing the impact of humanitarian assistance in the health sector

There have been significant improvements in the design and management of humanitarian aid responses in the last decade. In particular, a significant body of knowledge has been accumulated about public health interventions in emergencies, following calls for developing the evidence base of humanitarian health interventions. Several factors have prompted this, such as the increased volume of huma...

Burma and the challenge of humanitarian assistance.

www.thelancet.com Vol 370 October 27, 2007 1465 the community are homogeneous. The authors also assume that their single rural site in South Africa is typical. Although models must be intuitively plausible and qualitatively accurate, model validation does not necessarily follow from a good fi t to the available data, because many complex models can fi t limited data quite well. Many people in t...

Blocking humanitarian assistance: a crime against humanity?

Governing catastrophes: security, health and humanitarian assistance

Recent catastrophes, and predictions of an increasing potential for more, have stimulated thinking about the best policy responses to these threats. This article explores how security concepts influence catastrophe governance. The article considers how globalization affects thinking about catastrophes and describes ways in which catastrophes have been conceptualized as governance challenges, su...

A blueprint for professionalizing humanitarian assistance.

International humanitarian response to crises employs 210,000 people and accounts for nearly $15 billion in spending globally each year. Most action is carried out by not-for-profit organizations working with United Nations (UN) agencies, military organizations, and commercial entities. UN agencies employ many technical experts, often retaining them for five or more years. As yet there is no in...