“In 2011 the Humanitarian Emergency Response Review (HERR) called for humanitarian action to be underpinned by evidence and highlighted the need for more systematic and rigorous applied research. However, in order to build this body of evidence and ensure that practitioners can access and apply it, humanitarians and academics need to work in partnership.

But what are the key ingredients to an effective partnership between humanitarians and academics? What are the pitfalls and at what stage does it make sense to introduce certain activities or actors?

ELRHA commissioned a study in 2011 to answer this question. In addition to identifying the obstacles to partnership and how these can be overcome, the study report highlights a number of examples where effective partnerships between academics and practitioners have yielded results which have had a direct positive impact on vulnerable communities.

This online guide aims to be a practical resource to support collaboration between academic and humanitarian organisations. It shares the experiences and lessons learned by people who have embarked upon such collaboration. What was found was that while there is a large amount of documentation, toolkits, and guidance on how to develop partnerships in general which are useful … there is very little written about academic-humanitarian partnerships specifically. Given that there are some very distinct constraints and opportunities encountered by this type of collaboration; these guidelines aim to focus on the specifics of humanitarian-academic collaboration.”