By Sarah Bellovich, Yejin Stella An and Yuzuka Motegi

Background

In response to increasingly complex crises and responses to those crises, humanitarian practitioners must develop the skills they need to provide lifesaving, protective and accountable assistance which upholds the dignity of crisis-affected communities. As such, education and training are key steps towards effective humanitarian response.

Through its network of focal points, members and trainers, Sphere has connected with many educational and academic organisations over its 27-year history. However, there has been limited research undertaken to explore or document these relationships. From October 2023 to June 2024, Sphere partnered with us – a team of student researchers from the Geneva Graduate Institute (IHEID) – to investigate Sphere’s presence in tertiary humanitarian education, and to explore how humanitarian education may better serve the next generation of humanitarian professionals.

Project

Approaches employed during our nine-month research project included data analyses, surveys, a focus group, a desk review, and interviews to collect insights on Sphere’s current role and further potential to advance humanitarian education. Based on discussions with Sphere and our own cultural backgrounds, we focused our research on the United States, Afghanistan, Poland, Japan and South Korea.

Our findings emphasised the need to adapt to complex and diverse humanitarian contexts with informed and country-specific education programmes.

Our study identified the presence of Sphere in tertiary education on a global scale, reaching universities across the Americas, Europe, Asia, Africa and Oceania. Contrary to some of the literature we reviewed which calls for standardisation of humanitarian education, our findings emphasised the need to adapt to complex and diverse humanitarian contexts with informed and country-specific education programmes.

Our research identified several instances of incredible collaboration between universities and NGOs to drive community-driven humanitarian response.

We are grateful to people in the Sphere network who shared the challenges and best practices from their contexts with us. Our research identified several instances of incredible collaboration between universities and NGOs to drive community-driven humanitarian response, including programmes that integrated and adapted Sphere standards to serve local students through regionally-tailored training.

Our investigations also revealed differences in educational requirements; from humanitarian fundamentals to collaboration among organisations in rapidly expanding local and regional networks.

From one of the key informants’ interviews, we gained the insight that great care should be taken to understand the specific needs of individual students within a single learning environment. The interviewee described the diverse cohorts of students they have in their classrooms, and the great value that this can bring to the learning experience (see page 17 of our report).

 “This diversity also shed light on the importance of carefully considering the differences between individual understandings of concepts. Students could have differing ideas of ‘safety’ and ‘emergency’[1] which do not translate to effective practices in the field.”

Summary

Recommendations (pages 5 and 6): Our recommendations centred on expanding the visibility of Sphere, designing introductory materials and workshops about humanitarian standards, and strengthening networks through activities such as identifying key contacts to foster collaboration.

Research gaps: While some of our analyses were global, the focus of our deeper research was just five countries. From this sample, we can see that each country and region presents unique relationships, environmental contexts, and understandings of humanitarian response. And as such, we see great potential for further research to learn from experiences and innovations elsewhere in Sphere’s diverse and collaborative network – to further improve humanitarian standards education for future humanitarians.

Other research outcomes: As part of the project, we developed – and piloted – a facilitation guide for an online focus group (including a pre-event survey) and a key informant interview guide for academic stakeholders. These guides (from page 23 onwards) should serve for further research.

The Sphere team is grateful to Sarah, Yejin, and Yuzuka, and congratulates them on their successful project. Please stay tuned as we start to implement their recommendations.

View the students’ project report here: ARP 15 Final Report

For enquiries related to academia, please contact your nearest Sphere focal point, or the Sphere office at learning@spherestandards.org

Media enquiries: communications@spherestandards.org

[1] To discover how different people may understand the word ‘emergency’, please refer to the relevant page in the Humanitarian Encyclopedia Concept database, or learn more about the Humanitarian Encyclopedia.