From Barriers to Breakthroughs: Breakthroughs: Co-Creating Impact Evaluations in Humanitarian Aid

There is an unsettling reality in the humanitarian space that while humanitarian need continues to grow, funding to meet that need is increasingly insufficient. This underscores the importance of ensuring current humanitarian assistance programming is as impactful and cost-effective as possible. Determining the viability of any humanitarian assistance program requires an understanding of the program’s efficacy both in terms of the outcomes achieved and its cost-effectiveness. Impact evaluations can provide insights into both questions.

Humanitarian Assistance Evidence Cycle (HAEC) encourages implementing partners to adopt a 'co-creation' process when engaging researchers to conduct impact evaluations. This approach facilitates collaboration from an early stage in humanitarian program implementation, ensuring that research questions are aligned with the program's needs and that both implementers and researchers are fully invested in the evaluation's success. Converting interest in impact evaluations into successful research studies hinges on establishing an effective process early in research’s inception. By fostering collaborative partnerships, the research co-creation process helped to overcome existing barriers and enhance the effectiveness of humanitarian impact evaluations.