Over the past 15 years, the re-emergence of famine and near-famine events has challenged the notion that famine could soon be eradicated. Factors such as conflict, climate change, and economic…
Merry Fitzpatrick
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Click here to read Merry’s Young Scholar Profile.
Merry’s research interests span two separate but related fields. She has had a long-term interest in livelihoods and food security in conflict and post-conflict settings. The focus of this work is on supporting local strategies that households and communities use to mitigate, cope with, and recover from the effects of conflict. More recently, she has been studying the etiology of kwashiorkor malnutrition in order to design preventive interventions in extremely low resource settings and biomarkers to indicate the early stages of kwashiorkor. Although Merry has worked in most regions of the world, her research interests are primarily in central Africa around the Great Lakes, and the Sahel.
Merry has more than 20 years of field experience in humanitarian response. She worked with multiple humanitarian agencies, including the International Rescue Committee, GOAL Ireland, and Food for the Hungry. Most recently, at World Concern she was the Relief Director and then the Senior Director for Technical Support. With Feinstein she conducted research on the Somalia famine, resilience and livelihoods in Darfur, Sudan, and pastoralism. Additionally, she was the international research team leader on the Sudan Humanitarian Assistance and Resilience Program (SHARP) and continues to contribute to the center’s research.
Merry holds a B.S. in chemistry from University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, an M.B.A. with a concentration in international development from Hope International University, an M.Sc. in food policy and applied nutrition and a Ph.D. from the Friedman School of Nutrition Science and Policy at Tufts.
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This synthesis report reflects upon Phase 1 findings on humanitarian action in pastoral drylands of the Greater Horn and Sudano-Sahel.
This desk study examines common perceptions of pastoralism among humanitarians and barriers to international humanitarian systems meeting pastoralists’ needs.
Building on a previous report on the localization of humanitarian assistance, this study focuses on issues unique to the localization of humanitarian research.
This study reviews what we have learned regarding policies and interventions to prevent famine, and how these can be scaled up more rapidly.
This report examines how informal social safety nets operate, the functions they serve, who benefits, and the obligations on community members in North and South Darfur.
This report uses an innovative real-time index, the Income Streams Index (ISI), to teach us how households in three states in Darfur Sudan managed and adapted their livelihood activities in the face of multiple shocks of various types and sizes over three years.
This report explores the nexus (small n), as a way of programming, and the HDP Nexus approach (capital N), as the approach promoted by the UN and OECD/DAC.
This brief reviews how farming, agro-pastoralist, and pastoralist livelihood systems in Darfur are permanently changing in response to these major changes and in the face of ever-increasing pressure on natural resources.
ISI is a measure of one aspect of resilience that is being developed and refined through a three-year longitudinal panel study embedded in the Taadoud program. This report uses data from six rounds of data collection and describes trends in livelihood activities, correlating them with ISI scores over time.
This study found that there is a relatively small overlap between people deemed the most influential and the elected committee members of self-organizing groups.
Sometimes a group of people within a community exist somewhat separately. A clique is a subset of people within a larger group that has intense interaction within the subset but…
This brief explores the role of Neighbor Groups and Lead Mothers in supporting parents to care for their children in Budikaki.
The Budikadidi program struggled to reach the most vulnerable people through mainstream activities. However, when the program created groups specifically adapted to the unique needs and limitations of the most vulnerable, these people were able to participate and benefit from the program.
This publication presents a literature review activities in covering topics related to the natural environment and natural resource management in the Darfur region. This desk review serves as a foundation and reference for the NRM field studies and series of briefs, as part of the Taadoud II program, as well as supporting the development of training materials.
Livelihood systems in Darfur have experienced massive shocks and extreme changes over the past two decades. Though most communities are making positive progress, their recovery from multiple shocks over the…
This report describes exactly how shocks have affected specific livelihood groups in Darfur, the extent to which people have been able successful at recovering their self-sufficiency, and why.
This scoping study explores the resilience strategies of households in multiple livelihood systems by describing how households in Darfur have coped with conflict and other shocks over the past fifteen…