How we help Humanitarian Agencies
Why ELRHA matters
"The humanitarian sector is under pressure as never before, with growing donor requirements for accountability and transparency, new understandings of the complexity of humanitarian action bringing increasing expectations of the quality of responses, and a culture of austerity putting pressure on our budgets and capacity to reflect and analyse the environment. At the same time, university courses on humanitarianism and relief are multiplying; disaster relief is a growth area of academic enquiry and researchers are taking great strides in areas such as hazard mapping and sociological analysis of urban risk. Yet agencies are too overstretched to engage with, absorb or feed in to much of this work; and some say that academia is an irrelevance distant from the reality on the ground. It is critical that we put resources where they can do the most good; that research can inform, and be informed by, the work of practitioners. ELHRA is a vital conjunction of two spheres which have the potential to work together far more effectively than they can apart."
Laura Hudson, British Red Cross
Serving the humanitarian community
The UN agencies and International Non-Governmental Organisations are perhaps the most visible actors in the humanitarian field, often working at the forefront of large humanitarian efforts around the world, these organisations are a primary stakeholder of the ELRHA project and we seek to provide support to them to address the challenges they face in their work, however there are many other types of organisations and individuals who are engaged in humanitarian work that the ELRHA project also seeks to support, these include smaller NGOs and CBOs in disaster affected/vulnerable countries, national and local disaster management agencies and government departments engaged in the humanitarian effort. The ELRHA project will support all of these groups by providing the following:
- An online research matching facility
- Funding advice for research and training projects
- Support and contacts within Higher Education for every type of research need
- Small grant funding opportunities for collaborative projects
- Coordination of research into core humanitarian challenges
- Good practice case studies
- Supporting the development of relevant higher education courses for the humanitarian sector.
Benefits to the sector:
ELRHA hopes to make it much easier for humanitarian organisations to find the expertise they need to investigate and act on humanitarain challenges. With the global finaicial crisis triggering a tightening of belts across the board, research partnerships with Higher Education represents great value for money, and could result in long-term mutually beneficial partnerships that might not be found through the consultancy models more commonly used within the sector. As well as direct programme based research, Universities also offer the scope to carry out research on broader sector wide challenges, making them a core ally in the drive to prepare the humanitarain sector for the future.
