Posts in Resilience
HALO Trust - Mine Action in Afghanistan after the Taliban takeover: Imperatives in 2021 and Beyond

November 2021

The HALO Trust commissioned Samuel Hall to conduct empirical research on mine action in Afghanistan in June 2021, two months before the Taliban takeover of the country. The research involved primary data collection in two rural villages, in order to explore changes at the community level that occurred subsequent to HALO Trust landmine clearance. Samuel Hall had also conducted four prior studies and evaluations on mine action in Afghanistan from 2019-2021. This combined research informed the development of a policy brief, which explores the following areas: the changed political context but enduring humanitarian needs in Afghanistan; mine action in Afghanistan since the Taliban takeover; and policy implications and recommendations regarding principled mine action support in Afghanistan and globally.

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AKF - Implementing the CBC in Dadaab & Kakuma Refugee Camps

October 2021

In Kenya, UNHCR are partnering with the Ministry of Education to improve the delivery of the new Competency-Based Curriculum (CBC) in refugee camps and surrounding low-resource settings. As part of this effort, the Aga Khan Foundation tested the Values Based Education (VBE) modules in Kakuma to generate evidence of how this proven approach is relevant for teachers and schools in refugee settings as they strive to deliver the CBC with quality.

Samuel Hall was commissioned to provide a detailed examination into the current status of CBC implementation in Dadaab and Kakuma camps as well as generating initial evidence on efficacy and relevance of VBE in refugee settings. This report identifies the challenges, capacity gaps, and opportunities facing teachers and schools as they implement the CBC in Kenya’s refugee-hosting areas and identifies the potential of VBE to enable teachers to deliver the CBC with quality. The recommendations and learnings can also be considered more broadly across Kenya.

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ODI - Public narratives and attitudes towards refugees and other migrants

October 2021

Engaging public narratives and attitudes towards refugees and migrants within their host communities is an increasingly important task. There is however a lack of understanding and data on these narratives and attitudes. This is particularly the case for countries in sub-Saharan Africa. This ODI project, supported by the IKEA Foundation, aims to address this gap. Through a series of activities, dialogues, and innovative communication and outreach initiatives, the project is mapping recent research and evidence on public attitudes toward refugees and other migrants in several countries in Africa and Europe.

Samuel Hall lead interviews in Nigeria and Ethiopia and contributed to the writing of these new reports. ODI have also carried out similar research in Germany, the UK, Spain, Portugal, Sweden, Italy, the US, Kenya and Uganda.

Nigeria country profile
Ethiopia country profile
Project page

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AMIF – Monitoring, Evaluation and Learning of Actions financed by the Asylum Migration Integration Fund (AMIF)

March 2021

The Ministry of Foreign Affairs of the Netherlands, on behalf of the donors funding RDPP, commissioned Samuel Hall to conduct an evaluation to assess the results and impact of the AMIF-funded activities in Ethiopia and Sudan. AMIF actions aimed at enabling the provision of better protection, assistance and durable solutions for refugees and asylum seekers through improved documentation and robust data storage systems. This involved building a refugee registration system with biometric identification management, real-time data verification capacity and simultaneous identification of protection needs of persons of concern. Not only benefiting refugees, the actions also aimed to improve civil registration more broadly, in particular birth registration, be it among the refugee or host community.

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Download Sudan Report

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IOM & UNEP – Identifying Climate Adaptive Solutions to Displacement in Somalia

April 2021

This assessment report created by Samuel Hall for IOM, UNEP, and the Directorate for Environment and Climate Change of the Somali Government explores the interactions between climate change, displacement and urbanisation. It answers two key questions in the context of the Somali cities of Baidoa and Kismayo: What factors trigger climate-induced migration? And what adaptive and transformative solutions may contribute to building resilience amid displacement and climate change – at both the community and policy levels?

A mixture of qualitative and quantitative methods was used. Participatory research ensures that the voices of communities, individual households, and vulnerable populations are clearly and distinctly heard throughout the report.

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AFI – Bringing the Informal Sector Onboard: Challenges, Opportunities and Policy Solutions

April 2021

Approximately 2 billion people work in the informal sector globally, comprising 61% of the world’s workforce. Large-scale employment and economic activity occurs informally, especially the case in the Global South. AFI commissioned Samuel Hall to create practical knowledge products on how financial sector policymakers and regulators can better integrate the informal economy into the financial inclusion agenda and the formal sector. The "Bringing the Informal Sector Onboard" Guideline Note and Toolkit are both based on shared experiences between global AFI member countries, learning from specific challenges, opportunities and policy intervention mixtures across developing and emerging economies. This peer learning on bringing the informal sector onboard enhances knowledge and formulates usable policymaking tools, with direct impact on poverty reduction, sustainable and inclusive growth, and financial inclusion.

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AFI – Financial Inclusion of Forcibly Displaced Persons

December 2020

Forcibly displaced persons (FDPs) often lack access to finances – including savings accounts, transfers, loans and insurance. In support of AFI’s “Advancing the Financial Inclusion of FDPs: Putting Recommendations to Practice" , Samuel Hall created a guideline note on how to better include displaced people into National Financial Inclusion Strategies (NFIS) globally. In addition, Samuel Hall and AFI, with support from Strathmore University in Kenya, researched the financial inclusion of refugees and internally displaced persons (IDPs) to produce a series of case studies covering Afghanistan, Mauritania and Rwanda.

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COVID-19 in Afghanistan: Knowledge, Attitudes, Practices, and Implications

July 2020

COVID-19 threatens Afghanistan’s many gains, from progress in access to education for children and trust in formal protection mechanisms to social norms around gender and trust in Government. With a healthcare system already stretched to the limits, ongoing conflict and natural disasters, widespread food insecurity and reductions in foreign aid, stakeholders in Afghanistan were already facing a complex and worsening situation. COVID-19 has the potential to disastrously exacerbate this. Samuel Hall is supporting the Afghanistan Protection Cluster (PC) and other stakeholders with this brief to fill in key knowledge gaps around how COVID-19 is understood and perceived and its current and likely implications.

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The Halo Trust - The Link: Connecting Mine Action and Livelihoods

June 2020

As mine action stakeholders work towards a mine-free Afghanistan in a country experiencing active conflict and pervasive economic difficulties, there are growing imperatives to link clearance of mines from the land, with the livelihoods and development of people and communities on that land afterwards.Samuel Hall conducted an evaluation of the programme for the HALO Trust as the programme concluded, reviewing literature and conducting primary data collection and analysis from November 2019 to March 2020. The research emphasised a community-based mixed methods approach to evaluate the programme from beneficiaries’ perspectives, and placed community members’ feedback at the centre of the evaluation.

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UNICEF - Social Norms, Economic Approaches: The potential for addressing GBV through economic interventions in the Rohingya refugee response

June 2020

This report, commissioned by UNICEF, develops an evidence base on the potential for addressing gender-based violence in the Rohingya Refugee Response through economic interventions, seeking to understand the contextual risks, drivers, challenges, and possibilities. It highlights the possibilities for using economic interventions in this context, in particular how programming that utilises economic strategies in combination with other elements, and which aligns economic strategies with needs and drivers specific to the forms of GBV they seek to address based on strong contextual understandings, are likely to be the most successful in creating sustainable impacts for women and girls, and communities more broadly.

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WFP/MoLSA - Developing a Social Protection Policy for Somalia

August 2019

The Ministry of Labour and Social Affairs of Somalia, with technical support from WFP, UNICEF, and Samuel Hall, designed a National Social Protection Policy with the objective of protecting ‘all groups, particularly the poor and vulnerable, against shocks, helps them to manage risks, and provide them with opportunities to overcome poverty, vulnerability, and exclusion.’

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ILO/UNHCR - Doing Business in Dadaab

January 2019

Contrary to many popular perceptions, Dadaab is an area of opportunity with existing strengths that can be harnessed. This market systems analysis identifies these strengths as well as areas to build further, and provides the foundation for building opportunities to strengthen job creation and linkages between host and refugee communities as well as with private sector employers in Garissa county as well as with the capital.

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UNESCO - Inclusion of Afghan Refugees in the National Education Systems of Iran and Pakistan

November 2018

This paper was commissioned by the Global Education Monitoring Report as background information to assist in drafting the 2019 GEM Report, Migration, displacement and education: Building bridges, not walls, accessible here.

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Dubai Cares - Improving Access to and Quality of Early Childhood Education in Zanzibar

September 2018

This study assesses the relevance, effectiveness, efficiency, and sustainability of the Watoto Kwanza project, designed to address some of the key challenges facing Zanzibar’s pre-primary education sector as of 2013.

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Mercy Corps - Driven to leave: Aid & Migration

September 2018

Our policy briefs question the efficacy of traditional development investments that seek to deter migration from countries lacking basic rule of law and security; and question the impact of job training and skills building on migration intentions.

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UNICEF/MoLSAMD - Child Marriage in Afghanistan: Changing the Narrative

July 2018

The primary objective of this report is to provide contextualised analysis in the knowledge, attitudes and practices of communities in order to inform the development of future programming to either mitigate the impacts of child marriage or prevent further engagement in child marriage across Afghanistan.

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Dutch MFA/NWO - Aspirations and Youth programming in Somalia and Afghanistan

April 2018

We undertook data analysis and primary data collection in Afghanistan, Somalia, Greece and Italy to understand the commonalities and differences in decision-making processes – whether to migrate or to stay – among youth in conflict-affected settings.

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UNICEF/UNESCO - A Global initiative on Out-of-School-Children

June 2018

Samuel Hall has prepared this Country study in order to provide recommendations to key stakeholders on how to address the significant challenge of an estimated 3.7 million children aged 7-17 being out-of-school in Afghanistan.

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