What we look for when funding humanitarian health research: the evolution of our thinking over ten years
OUR MINDSET WHEN SELECTING GRANTS
Most R2HC grants are awarded through our annual open funding calls. We launched our first call for proposals in 2013 and since then our commitment to funding rigorous and ethical research has remained unchanged. Open calls allow applicants to select the topics of greatest importance based on evidence gaps, for example, those identified through the 2015 Humanitarian Health Evidence Review and its subsequent update. Our Funding Committee – made up of specialists from across the humanitarian health research field – are then tasked with identifying the strongest proposals which could influence the global humanitarian response.
From the outset, a heavy emphasis was placed on the methodological rigour and ethics of undertaking research with vulnerable populations. While initially ‘rigour’ was often perceived by others to mean randomised controlled trials, our Funding Committee was dedicated to supporting the most suitable methodologies for the type of study. Most of the studies we’ve funded have used mixed methods, balancing quantitative approaches with qualitative methods that help inform how interventions can be appropriately scaled or that respond to local specificities.
An initial hope had been that research teams would be able to develop methodological innovations for humanitarian contexts. Our 2019 retrospective review of Research Methodologies in Humanitarian Crises suggested that these were relatively rare, however, adapting established methods to the study contexts was a common occurrence. Responding to demand from the humanitarian research community, in 2017 we developed an Ethics Tool and framework. This has provided a critical resource for applicants and grantees to think through the ethical challenges associated with conducting research among highly vulnerable populations.
FUNDING TRENDS
Our understanding of what makes for impactful research has evolved in the last decade, as has the role of our Funding Committee and what they look for when making funding decisions.
Across the nine annual funding calls we have launched in our lifetime, we’ve observed a number of trends in the type of proposals that our Committee has chosen to fund. There has been a willingness to fund neglected research topics in challenging locations if appropriate risk measures are proposed, especially through the involvement of in-country organisations. There has been a movement towards funding research that is locally relevant, even though this does not always generate globally applicable findings – which was one of the main interests of our funders initially. In some thematic areas, our Committee has recognised that so little research has been conducted that it isn’t yet clear what methods can produce clear results. They have nevertheless been willing to fund such studies to generate important insights. We’ve also sought to fund studies that incorporate cost analyses to help inform operational decision-making, building on discussions at our 2019 Research Forum and 2021 webinar on health economics in humanitarian research.
We’ve seen our Committee place more emphasis on the equity and strength of research partnerships, prioritising teams where in-country organisations take the lead. The pathways that lead to research achieving impact have become a more pronounced focus in proposal assessments, and impact and uptake criteria have been given greater weighting in recent years. By contrast, the Committee has relied more on external reviewers to provide technical expertise on topics, and looked to the quality of applicants’ ‘rebuttals’ to inform how well concerns have been addressed. As the quality of applications has improved, so the number of fundable proposals has increased. Our Committee meetings have consequently adjusted to spend more time prioritising these, making decisions based on the anticipated impact of research findings and consequent value for money.
Looking ahead, we plan to undertake a governance review to help us consider what skills and experience we need on our Funding Committees in the future. We want to further diversify our Committee making sure a wider range of voices are represented – both in terms of lived experience of humanitarian crises and better representation of social sciences – and in support of Elrha’s commitment to shifting the power (read more in this blog).
