Chamutal Eitam-Afek and Liesbet Heyse awarded grant by Humanitarian Innovation Fund

The Faculty of Arts is pleased to announce that its staff member Chamutal Eitam (NOHA Humanitarian Action Programme / ICOG PhD student) and Dr Liesbet Heyse (Assistant Professor in Sociology, Faculty of Behavioural and Social Sciences) have been awarded a EUR 160,000 grant by the Humanitarian Innovation Fund.  Eitam’s PhD research project, entitled ‘Organisational learning and evaluation practices in humanitarian organisations’, was the inspiration to apply for funding with Heyse, who specializes in the performance and professionalization of humanitarian and nongovernmental organizations.

The new project is called ‘The Humanitarian Lessons Learned Genome Project 1.0. Facilitating the full use of evaluative processes in the humanitarian sector’. Its aim is to develop open-source technology to make evaluation data more easily and widely accessible to the humanitarian community. The overall goal is the more efficient use of knowledge in today’s highly complex humanitarian practice. Eitam and Heyse hope to develop an instrument to decipher the hereditary ‘DNA’ patterns of humanitarian aid (i.e. the Genome) and so provide humanitarian organizations with a potent learning device for their day-to-day activities at headquarters and in the field.

The Humanitarian Innovation Fund supports organizations and individuals in identifying, nurturing and sharing innovative solutions to the challenges facing operational agencies in the delivery of effective humanitarian aid. The Groningen proposal and three others selected for their quality and audacity were chosen from over 180 project proposals . The project will begin in January 2012. For more detailed information, please see http://humanitarianinnovation.org/projects/groningen, or contact C.Eitam@rug.nl and L.Heyse@rug.nl.