The Hilton Foundation’s Disaster Relief and Recovery portfolio provides fast, flexible funding that assists in disaster prevention, relief, and recovery around the world. The funding allows them to provide support at the onset of a disaster, as well as in protracted and forgotten crises.
Their approach focuses on promoting more efficient and effective assistance, and when possible, investing in community-based organisations and networks to build local humanitarian leadership.
Itad has been engaged to better understand the enablers and barriers of emergency responses and provide learning to inform future strategy and investment decisions.
Our role
We are exploring the enablers and barriers to relevant, timely and accountable emergency response, which will help the Hilton Foundation to learn and adapt its funding approaches within the disaster relief and recovery portfolio.
Our work focuses on Hilton Foundation grants to four pooled funding mechanisms and to an international non-governmental organisation (INGO) for its emergency response.
Our evaluation has an emphasis on learning, rather than a traditional accountability purpose, which should also help grantees to improve their ways of working.
Methods and approaches
We are delivering this evaluation through a case study approach focusing on five grantees to reach a detailed understanding of the enablers and barriers to effective humanitarian assistance within the real-life contexts of the responses undertaken by grant recipients and their partners.
We are working with in-country partners in India, Guatemala, Ethiopia, Pakistan and Somalia who are gathering and analysing data on a specific response per grantee.
The key enablers and barriers will be summarised into a synthesis report and we will facilitate workshops to support learning and co-creation of lessons/recommendations with the Hilton Foundation and its grantees.
We are using a participatory approach, working closely with the Foundation’s grant management and evaluation team, as well as the grantees, throughout evaluation design and delivery to ensure that our work adds as much value and utility as possible for the Foundation and its partners.
Outcomes and impact
We hope the evaluation will help the Hilton Foundation, its grantees and the wider humanitarian sector better understand the enablers and barriers to effective humanitarian assistance for future investment programming. Our evaluation also aims to support grantees in adapting their own programming based on our findings.
