The Humanitarian Exchange and Research Centre works to close the gap between policy and humanitarian practice.

About Us

Founded in Geneva in 2014, the Humanitarian Exchange and Research Centre (HERE) works to close the gap between policy and humanitarian practice. We endeavour to understand and promote the steps that need to be taken in order to uphold the rights of crisis-affected people.

Spotlight

NEW | The Future of Humanitarian Coordination

Supported by the governments of Sweden, Norway and Switzerland, this project aims to provide actionable suggestions on how to address some of the longstanding challenges in the way of effective humanitarian coordination, i.e. to identify what needs revitalisation, reinvigoration, or renewal. The starting assumption about the future humanitarian landscape is that the UN will retain its primary role in coordinating humanitarian action for at least the next decade. This project will also provide humanitarian policy makers with a review of the deeper outstanding challenges for meaningful humanitarian coordination. Starting from working hypotheses on what impedes coordination, major pressure points are identified to offer suggestions for both quick fixes and long-term solutions.
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Latest outputs

More than the sum of the parts? Collective leadership vs individual agency

What incentives exist for collective leadership in humanitarian response? This paper is HERE's contribution to GELI and CHA-Berlin's joint event 'Leadership for an Ever-Changing World: Amplifying Collaboration and Transformation within the Humanitarian Sector'.
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Hear, HERE! Episode 3 | Humanitarian Data

In this two-part episode, Balthasar Staehelin, former ICRC Director of Digital Transformation and Data, discusses humanitarian data: what data should be collected? How do you ensure principled collection, storage, and use? What role can or should States play, and what space is there for data subjects?
Listen to the podcast

Coordination Roadmap Walkthrough Video Series

This video series is a companion piece to HERE-Geneva's 2022 Future of Humanitarian Coordination Roadmap, and provides tools to better understand and use it.
Watch the walkthrough

UNICEF as a leader

Two members of our research team have been commissioned by UNICEF as part of the team that will evaluate its role as Cluster Lead Agency (CLA) and to conduct a review of the co-leadership arrangement of the education cluster.
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The Role of Mandates | Final report

For the past three years, HERE Geneva has been researching the role that mandates – defined broadly as organisations’ goals or missions (the ‘why’) – play in how humanitarian organisations set priorities in situations of armed conflict: arguably the most complex and contested spaces in which humanitarians operate.
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Review of Education Cluster Co-Leadership

The Global Education Cluster is the only Global Cluster co-led by a UN agency and an NGO (Save the Children International). The review of the Education Cluster Co-Leadership considers and assesses progress made since the last review in 2010, and provides suggestions as to what can be done differently or needs to happen to confront challenges encountered.
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Evaluation of UNICEF’s role as Cluster Lead (Co-Lead) Agency

HERE staff members led and were involved in an evaluation looking at the four UNICEF (co-)led clusters (namely, nutrition, education, water, sanitation and hygiene and the child protection area of responsibility) to investigate how UNICEF carries out its Cluster Lead (Co-Lead) Agency (CLA) role at the global and country levels.
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Principled Humanitarian Programming in Yemen | January 2022

Supported by ECHO, the research behind this report has aimed to develop an understanding of the challenges and decisions related to negotiations, access, and coordination that organisations pursue to uphold principled humanitarian action in Yemen.
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ongoing work

CHS Verification Scheme review

This review aims to provide analysis of what it will take for the CHS Verification Scheme to meet its ambition, as many organisations as possible measuring how they are meeting the commitments to people in crisis and making the needed improvements. Its focus will be on what is required from the perspective of national actors.
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Review of inter-agency project for refugees and displaced

HERE-Geneva, together with ECORYS, is currently carrying out a mid-term evaluation of the COMPASS programme, implemented by the International Organization for Migration (IOM) and funded by the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of the Netherlands.
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HERE Publications

We carry out applied, mixed-methods research and analysis, engage in dialogue with operational humanitarian actors, and feed the humanitarian community with independent reports, policy papers, and studies. Browse through our library!

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