Article type
Year
Abstract
Background: Challenges of conducting impact evaluations of interventions, actions and strategies in natural disasters and complex political emergencies are well recognized. Without a rigorous scoping study, there is no single resource informing researchers what the priority areas for impact evaluations (IEs) are, nor a mapping of the gaps that exist in current research.
Objectives: To investigate the current landscape of evidence, with emphasis on evidence from IEs, in the humanitarian sector to identify areas in which actionable evidence is available and where evidence is needed to direct research.
Methods: The study incorporated multiple methods to assess available evidence including an online survey of participants knowledgeable in the humanitarian sector, semi-structured interviews with experts in the sector, extensive literature reviews of repositories of humanitarian studies and strategy documents of major humanitarian organisations and a gap map presenting results of a thorough search for completed, ongoing and planned IEs of humanitarian interventions.
Results: With the exception of health and nutrition, most areas in the humanitarian sector suffer from a paucity of evidence. An evidence gap map provides an illustration of the landscape of evidence. There is agreement amongst policymakers that decisions should be based on research evidence and that IEs can and should have a greater role to play in building the evidence base.
Conclusions: Key recommendations of this study, beyond informing areas and questions for IEs are that:
- Humanitarians must agree upon ways of prioritising research needs. This study suggests a framework for prioritizing further research.
- Efforts should be made to index and classify existing evidence and a single unifying repository or portal would to improve the ease of accessibility to existing evidence.
- A single set of templates and reporting guidelines should be agreed upon to aid in the indexing and classification of evaluation studies. It would also be beneficial to agree upon standards for data collection in these studies.
Objectives: To investigate the current landscape of evidence, with emphasis on evidence from IEs, in the humanitarian sector to identify areas in which actionable evidence is available and where evidence is needed to direct research.
Methods: The study incorporated multiple methods to assess available evidence including an online survey of participants knowledgeable in the humanitarian sector, semi-structured interviews with experts in the sector, extensive literature reviews of repositories of humanitarian studies and strategy documents of major humanitarian organisations and a gap map presenting results of a thorough search for completed, ongoing and planned IEs of humanitarian interventions.
Results: With the exception of health and nutrition, most areas in the humanitarian sector suffer from a paucity of evidence. An evidence gap map provides an illustration of the landscape of evidence. There is agreement amongst policymakers that decisions should be based on research evidence and that IEs can and should have a greater role to play in building the evidence base.
Conclusions: Key recommendations of this study, beyond informing areas and questions for IEs are that:
- Humanitarians must agree upon ways of prioritising research needs. This study suggests a framework for prioritizing further research.
- Efforts should be made to index and classify existing evidence and a single unifying repository or portal would to improve the ease of accessibility to existing evidence.
- A single set of templates and reporting guidelines should be agreed upon to aid in the indexing and classification of evaluation studies. It would also be beneficial to agree upon standards for data collection in these studies.