GPPi launches project about measuring the impact of protection

The United Kingdom’s Department for International Development (or DFID) has commissioned GPPi to carry out a study about how different humanitarian actors address the challenge of measuring the impact of their protection interventions. Launched in October 2012 and set to end in January 2013, the project is titled ​“Scoping Study: What Works in Protection and How do We Know?”

Protection aims to reduce the exposure of civilians to harm and mitigate its effect in situations of armed conflict and natural disaster. Measuring the impact of protection activities can be difficult in the absence of counterfactual analysis. Humanitarian organizations need to provide evidence that protection efforts contribute to the reduced or non-occurrence of deliberate, incidental or indiscriminate harm to civilians. Moreover, gathering and disclosing information about atrocities against civilian populations committed by different parties to a conflict is much more sensitive than sharing data on, for instance, the number of children reached through emergency vaccination campaigns.

Drawing on academic literature, operational guidance and expert interviews, the study team will first determine what kind of humanitarian activities should or should not be considered humanitarian protection. Once the meaning and scope of humanitarian protection has been clarified, the study team will turn to the core question of the study: how to determine and measure the impact of different activities used by humanitarian actors to protect civilians from violence. The project will focus on methodological questions linked to data collection systems; the identification of protection priorities in particular operational contexts; and the development of a theory of change for different kinds of interventions. Finally, the team will develop a number of questions that are expected to feed into a larger DFID research project on emerging policy and operational challenges for humanitarian protection in contemporary armed conflicts and natural disasters.