The Center’s three-year program was created in June 2005 along with a ten-year vision statement. The program was designed to transition the Center from a small and famine-focused unit to a larger, more integrated, applied research and teaching center focusing on the plight of marginalized communities caught up in crisis. The three-year plan came at a time when a major new funder (Humanity United) began supporting our work and two funders (OFDA-USAID and the Andrew Mellon Fund) ended support as a result of their general withdrawal from funding humanitarian research and teaching.We believe we have achieved significantly more than we anticipated in terms of our research and institutional change agendas, and met our targets regarding teaching, dissemination capacity, and securing a permanent base in Africa. We have not been quite as successful in our global network agenda, but lessons have been learned to feed into our next three-year plan.
We are, at heart, an applied research center. In part one of this report we briefly describe the humanitarian environment in which we work and the issues affecting marginalized communities, now and in the near future. We then present some of our more significant research achievements and the related institutional changes these achievements have allowed us to promote. In part two we give a detailed description of all of our research achievements over the three years before highlighting achievements in teaching and education. After describing the significant achievements we have made in evolving the systems, human resources, and networks of the Center, we conclude by reporting on our ongoing work to forge a global humanitarian research coalition.
