Urban Crises Learning Fund

How do cities cope with influxes of displaced persons fleeing a conflict or disaster, particularly if these cities are already struggling to provide services and infrastructure to residents? How can humanitarian agencies better collaborate with urban managers and work with existing structures in responding to crises in urban contexts? 

The three-year Urban Crises Learning Fund project seeks to address these, and other questions, by reflecting on past humanitarian responses, filling evidence gaps through primary research, and learning from experiences in other fields.

By engaging humanitarian agencies in the process of research and learning, alongside urban stakeholders from municipal officials to civil society, the learning fund seeks to contribute to a more in-depth understanding of how the humanitarian sector can most effectively operate in urban contexts and work with urban actors.

This is imperative in an increasingly urban world facing both slow- and fast-onset crises, from food shortages to conflict and natural disasters.

What IIED is doing

IIED is leading a three-year programme of research, documentation of past experiences, development of tools and guidelines, and shared learning across humanitarian actors and other urban stakeholders. There will be three main strands of work:

• Two learning partnerships, running for two years, will learn from and document the effective principles and practices that are already being used by international humanitarian actors, local government, civil society, donors and other stakeholders. One learning partnership is led by the International Rescue Committee (IRC) and is generating toolkits and guidance notes to do this more effectively. The other is led by Habitat for Humanity and is generating knowledge from past approaches to urban responses.
• Research grants will be used to support innovative thematic and regional research on key issues shaping humanitarian responses in urban areas, and
• Events and workshops will disseminate best practices and advocacy messages, discuss policy changes, disseminate and analyse learning from urban programming in humanitarian contexts, and build the capacity of key actors.