2023 was another challenging year for the humanitarian community. Climate shocks, disease, political instability and conflict have left nearly 300 million people in need of humanitarian assistance, and seen more than 114 million people displaced (UN OCHA)

This accelerating level of global humanitarian need is the driving force behind our new Strategy, which we launched earlier this year. The Strategy defines our work until 2040, laying out our ambition to make research and innovation (R&I) a transformative force within the humanitarian community. In delivering these ambitions, we ourselves will have to change: the way we look and behave; the way we engage and convene; the way we fund; the way we are governed, all must evolve.

In the last year we have already begun to make inroads: through our focused and responsive funding calls, showcasing the impact of R&I on humanitarian action – both in our own work and that of the wider community – and direct engagement and discussion with actors at all levels of the system.

As 2023 draws to a close, we’ve compiled some highlights from across our work, as well as a message from our friends in the UK Humanitarian Innovation Hub (UKHIH).

Shifting the Power

Our Strategy includes our core commitment to creating a more equitable Humanitarian Research and Innovation (HRI) system with greater accountability to people affected by crisis.

Understanding that a large part of this relates to not just what but who we fund, our R2HC programme trialled a new approach in their most recent funding call, successfully adapting their application processes to accommodate more Global South leadership within research teams.

The Community-Led Innovation Partnership (CLIP) has contributed significantly to this commitment since their inception. The initiative came to the end of ‘Phase 1’ this year, having funded 45 locally-led innovations since 2020 from innovators in Guatemala, Indonesia and Philippines. For ‘Phase 2’they will be expanding their work into South Sudan.

Amplifying local voices is a necessity for achieving greater equity within HRI, as the GPE’s regional consultations are proving. The results of these consultations are providing a bottom-up approach to understanding global HRI needs, centring the perspectives of regional actors in identifying priority attention areas for financial support.

Focusing funding to meet priority needs

As global conflicts and the increasing effects of the climate crisis continue to drive humanitarian need, HRI funding must remain reactive to emerging crises, as well as to the existing priorities of both practitioners and communities in affected regions.

The HIF launched Innovation Challenges across two of its core focus areas – gender-based violence (GBV) and scale – aimed at addressing specific barriers in both fields. The former sought to bring new and emerging technologies into GBV programming, by supporting tech-based interventions through a piloting period. The latter aimed to explore new routes for scaling innovations by funding organisations active in very high severity settings to adopt and implement funded innovations in these contexts.

In response to the growing food insecurity crisis in the Horn of Africa, R2HC launched a multi-year research programme to identify preventative solutions for households and communities at risk of food insecurity, starting with the publication of a literature review examining evidence on linkages between food insecurity and a range of other health indicators. An operational package of preventive measures for children under five, and pregnant and lactating women is due in 2025.

Equipping the HRI system with tools and guidance

For R&I to play a central role in improving humanitarian action, knowledge of best practice and a shared understanding of priorities is important for effective coordination. Over the year we’ve produced evidence-based tools to help researchers and innovators make their work more targeted, inclusive and impactful.

Our Research Impact Framework lays out a set of strategies and enablers that are characteristic of high-impact research to prompt humanitarian health researchers, as well as their partners and funders, to design research with impact in mind. Similarly, our Participation for Humanitarian Innovation toolkit provides a starting point for teams to improve inclusion in their project design. The kit features five tools for setting expectations for and monitoring the level of participation within R&I projects for, with, and by people affected by crisis.

To guide academics on which research questions were of greatest priority to practitioners, we launched two research priority settings for mental health and psychosocial support (MHPSS) and water, sanitation and hygiene (WASH). Following consultations with researchers, practitioners and policymakers around the world, 20 priority questions were deduced for each area. These questions will act as a guide for the next decade of humanitarian health research.

Increasing awareness of the role R&I can play in humanitarian programming

Engaging with the humanitarian community is key to understanding the role R&I can play in crisis contexts, and for embedding it into humanitarian programming.

A GPE report investigated how R&I has been used and engaged with in the first year of the response to the crisis in Ukraine. The report offered a set of recommendations for the wider community, which included increased collaboration between INGOs and Ukrainian research bodies, and simplified, flexible funding mechanisms to enable more innovation.

Our recent webinar series on innovations tackling GBV in humanitarian settings showcased pioneering projects, such as a framework to address gender bias in humanitarian organisations, and an innovation delivering therapy for GBV survivors via virtual reality. Violence against women and girls is still one of the most prevalent human rights violations in the world each year, and in an accompanying blog, we called for greater investment in and adoption of innovations and research aimed at improving humanitarian responses to GBV.

Demonstrating our Impact

Demonstrating the positive impact of our work is a cornerstone of our Strategy, as is understanding how that impact adds up over many levels.

Evaluation of our funded work has been an effective way to reflect on and showcase our impact on humanitarian policy and practice. Over the last year R2HC, the HIF and the CLIP have all produced case studies capturing stories, successes, and learnings, from across the work we fund, generating important insights to share with the HRI community.

Breaking down barriers to impact is as important as achieving the impact itself. Our Journey to Scale initiative continues to support innovations through a crucial stage of their scaling journey, while a pilot initiative to provide follow-on funding for research uptake activities is allocating vital resources to an often overlooked step in the research impact pathway.

It’s also critical to consider the impact we have already had on the humanitarian community, and the influence it’s had on us. This year we marked our R2HC programme turning ten years old. The anniversary was an opportunity for us to reflect on topics that have played a key role in shaping the programme, as well as its contribution to improving humanitarian public health over the last decade.

Strengthening the humanitarian system

Ultimately, our aim is that these combined efforts will contribute to strengthening the humanitarian community and system, but to do that, we must also challenge the parts no longer fit for purpose.

At this year’s Humanitarian Networks and Partnerships Week we shared the first key insights from the GPE’s multi-level consultations, most notably that the results make a strong case that funding for HRI is not being targeted in a strategic way towards priority needs. Our panel were called upon to offer suggestions on how to improve the performance and coordination of research and innovation within the humanitarian system, with recommendations ranging from better inclusions of local and diaspora actors in decision-making to re-examining the role of the UN clusters.

Another key insight from this discussion, was the need to improve the availability of data on HRI impact. This issue was something we examined in a GPE report exploring a method for assessing value-for-money and return on investment for innovations. The report lays out potential solutions for some of the main challenges in this field, and we have since had further discussions with humanitarian innovation actors on ways to further integrate this evidence into the sector.

Looking to the future

Next year we will continue to deliver on our Strategy, with work already underway that we’ll be sharing more about in 2024. We’ll be publishing the synthesis of all the insights and feedback from the GPE’s regional and national consultations. We will continue to support HRI actors in identifying the most important areas for action, launching a new research priority setting for non-communicable diseases, and probing our gap analysis on disability and older age inclusion to explore more opportunities for innovation. The next year will also see the return of our Innovation Forum, providing a valuable opportunity to bring the community together.

UKHIH’s reflections on 2023

By Sian White, Director of UK Humanitarian Innovation Hub (UKHIH)

As we approach the end of 2023, we can reflect on the incredible work that has been achieved over the past 12 months and look forward to an exciting scope of work for the year ahead.

We have carved out time to reflect on the Hub’s work, conducting an internal review, to clarify our positioning within the sector and shape our strategic direction for the coming years.

We have continued to do deep dives into thematic areas which could transform the humanitarian sector through our Accelerated Innovation Collaborations (AICs) on satellites to support humanitarian decision making, strengthening global surgical capacity, community engagement around vaccines, and collective crisis intelligence. Next year, we will launch a new AIC on mortality estimation as a means of improving response, supporting aid prioritisation and measuring the toll of crises on affected populations. This will include important work to document the situation in Gaza.

We’ve also launched several new Rapid Response Reports, designed to support real-time learning in emerging crises. We continue to look for novel ways to drive action around the findings of these reports, for example our recent report on famine aversion in Somalia will be followed by strategic roundtable events focused at creating change, and our report on ethics in Afghanistan has led us to develop a tool for humanitarians to navigate complex ethical dilemmas.

We believe that the expertise needed to solve many of the sectors’ most complex challenges does exist – we just need to bring the right people together to help facilitate systems-level innovation and change.