Tufts – Feinstein International Center

The Financial Resilience program seeks to promote understanding of financial resilience – the ability of a household or community to prevent, sustain, or recover from financial shocks – in marginalized populations in high-risk/high-stress environments.

How does the work of aid agencies during and after conflict affect people’s perceptions of change? What can we learn from recent experience? Our work in Nepal has uncovered a number of interesting issues around the humanitarian-development relationship and the challenges of social transformation in a (hopefully) post-conflict environment that we feel are important to research both because they are largely unexplored and because of their potential policy implications.

Over the past three years, Tufts/FIC has conducted 12 country case studies on local perceptions of the work of humanitarian agencies. The objective was to understand, from the perspective of those most affected by crisis and conflict, whether humanitarian action was seen as responding to a universal imperative or as an externally-driven approach linked to Northern and Western agendas.

Tufts/FIC commissioned a microfinance assessment undertaken as part of the joint UNDP-IOM-Tufts project earlier this year. That document, “Championing the Coping Economy: An Assessment of the Microfinance Market in Darfur: Gaps and Opportunities,” reviews the financial sector of Sudan and Darfur, and assesses the potential for microfinance as a tool for economic recovery in Darfur.

With ELRHA we are building a global network of study hubs, one on each continent, which will help develop a set of core competencies for aid workers and from that a system for delivering those competencies through training and apprenticeship in order to establish a global mechanism for certifying the competency of aid workers.