IMPACT Initiatives

13/10/2026

When disaster strikes, it is the home that meets it first. It is also where resilience begins.

Today marks the International Day for Disaster Risk Reduction , under the theme . Across crises and disasters, evidence continues to show how hazards affect homes and households first, shaping people's ability to cope, recover, and prepare for future shocks. It also points to practical ways to strengthen resilience: investing in safer housing, ensuring early warnings reach every household, and better understanding how losses and vulnerabilities accumulate over time.

🏠 Investing in safer homes

In Uganda’s Nyumanzi settlement, research on climate hazards among refugee and host communities shows how fragile shelters, scarce building materials, and the burden of shelter maintenance, borne largely by refugee women, turn recurring floods and extreme heat into drivers of deepening vulnerability.
In Adré, Chad, our recent area-based assessment found that all households in the temporary site live in makeshift shelters, and that shelter damage was the most common consequence reported among the 59% of households affected by a hazard in the past year.
In Ukraine, REACH research on housing repair highlights that compensation alone does not always result in a safe, fully restored home. Hidden damage, costs, and labour shortages can leave repairs incomplete and households exposed.

📢 Early warning that reaches every home

In Kabalo, DRC, nearly 95% of households affected by the April 2026 floods reported receiving no early warning before the waters rose. In Somalia, 83% of 412 assessed displacement sites experienced flooding at least once between 2023 and 2025, yet only 15-21% of flooded sites evacuated in any given year. With El Niño conditions expected this season, these findings underscore the importance of early warning systems that reach households in time and are paired with safe, realistic options to act.

📊 Understanding loss and damage through needs and vulnerability

Our household-level loss and damage pilot in Somalia found that many households entered the 2025-2026 drought without having fully recovered from previous shocks. More than 95% reported damage to roofs or walls, while at least 60% could not afford repairs. Among drought-displaced households, 76% did not feel prepared for another drought. These findings suggest that loss and damage assessments should look beyond the impacts of a single event and consider the recovery gaps that leave the most vulnerable households less able to withstand the next shock.

🔗Explore all the resources highlighted in this post in the first comment below.

07/10/2026

People who flee frontline areas in without using organised evacuation are often seen as self-reliant. But IMPACT Initiatives’ latest research shows that the reality is more complex.

For many, the same challenges that make support essential, such as limited resources, mobility constraints, or uncertainty about the future, can also make organised evacuation difficult to access.

To shed light on these experiences, we developed:

➤ A Story Map featuring three anonymised journeys of people displaced through their own means.
➤ A Report exploring broader trends, vulnerabilities, and recommendations from the Ukraine Protection Cluster to better reach those who remain outside formal support systems.

Key findings:

● Many people delay leaving until the last possible moment, reducing their options for safe departure.

● Self-organised displacement often comes with significant financial, logistical, and security challenges.

● Stronger support in host communities can help people leave earlier and rebuild their lives more confidently.

● With the right support, early self-organised displacement can strengthen resilience and improve outcomes for displaced people.

Together, these findings challenge the assumption that self-organised displacement equals self-reliance and highlight ways to make support more accessible for those who need it most.

Access the resources in English and Ukrainian - links in the first comment.

01/10/2026

Communities want cash. The humanitarian system is still not delivering it at scale.

This is not a new finding. Study after study has pointed in the same direction. By synthesizing evidence from a dozen documented contexts, the CALP Network highlights a persistent gap between how people want to receive assistance and how aid is ultimately delivered. Across our assessments, preferences are indeed strikingly consistent. The 2025 MSNA in Haiti showed that 79% of households preferred cash assistance while in Kenya, 58% of respondents preferred to receive aid via mobile money. In Moldova, 2025 REACH assessment on accountability and humanitarian assistance for refugees from Ukraine highlighted that cash assistance was the most common type of support and was widely considered the most useful by refugees.

As a member of CALP, we were proud to contribute to this report through data, analysis, and reviews. We have taken note of their recommendations on updating MSNA methods to be more consistent across crises and will implement these across 20 crises contexts this year. We look forward to sharing the results with response partners, including CALP, later this year and urge response actors to use these results when determining their modalities of assistance.

At the same time, while cash is clearly the preferred modality, this doesn't always mean it is the right modality. We also need to understand how preferences interact with market conditions, protection concerns, access constraints, and other operational realities.

This is why we believe maintaining an update to date evidence base on both modality preferences and market conditions is critical to ensure that humanitarian assistance is shaped by both what people want and the lived experiences of living and access local markets in contexts of crises.

Access the CALP Network report: https://buff.ly/UkVw1Vv

People say they want cash assistance. We say we listen. So why aren’t we delivering it?

29/09/2026

Afghanistan | The country has experienced an above-average increase in temperatures in a context already prone to floods, droughts, and other natural hazards. While these changes pose growing risks to livelihoods and communities, they may also create opportunities to adapt to a changing climate. However, people affected by humanitarian crises often lack the resources needed to mitigate the effects and seize potential opportunities.

🔴 In higher temperatures, crops require more water due to increased evaporation. This increases the likelihood and severity of agricultural droughts, with drought-related losses in agricultural production posing serious risks for livelihoods and food security in Afghanistan.

🔴 Rapid glacier melt is combining with earlier snowmelt and a shift from snow to rainfall. This exposes Afghans to greater risk of spring flooding, contributing to loss of life, property, and agricultural production.

🔴 A combination of poverty, food insecurity, and natural hazards is driving population movements inside Afghanistan. Many are moving towards urban centres, which are already burdened by population growth and forced returns of Afghan refugees from neighbouring countries.

🔴 Sustainable resource management is constrained by water, stress and effective technical expertise and regulation of pasture, among other factors, as illustrated by five in-depth assessments on pasture management in Northwest Afghanistan.

Amid the overwhelmingly negative headlines about climate change, some positive prospects for adaptation remain in Afghanistan. High altitude areas will benefit from longer growing seasons and increased water availability from glacier melt, providing opportunities for agriculture. In areas seeing primarily negative impacts, communities have been working to adapt by collecting water through rainwater harvesting and snow pits, reducing flood impacts through protective walls and canals, and making agriculture more resilient through diversified and faster growing crops. However, barriers including financial constraints, limited access to technology, gaps in knowledge, and weak coordination limit these potential positive effects. Additional research on the effectiveness of these locally driven solutions may enable more effective support to communities, making them more resilient in a heating world.

➜ Upcoming: to provide more evidence on early warning and flood preparedness, IMPACT is supporting ACAPS with a new assessment this September. The findings will be made available by ACAPS in October 2026.

🔗 Access our research on climate change in Afghanistan, internal displacement due to natural hazards, and pasture management in Northwest Afghanistan, through the links in the first comment.

Global temperatures are rising, and they are doing so at an increasing pace. According to UNEP’s recent Limiting Overshoot report, global warming may reach 1.5°C above pre-industrial levels around the end of this decade if current warming trends continue. In Afghanistan, academic research shows t...

24/09/2026

📉 As humanitarian assistance declines, the economics of displacement are becoming impossible to ignore.

Two recent assessments, one with Ukrainian refugee households in Moldova, one with returnees in Sumska Oblast, Ukraine, point to the cost of displacement and the financial pressure refugees and internally displaced people are facing.

In Moldova, most refugee households have reached a degree of stability: Temporary Protection status, jobs, access to services. But half report having no savings at all, and those who do are spending them on rent, utilities, and food, not building resilience. As humanitarian cash assistance shrinks, that buffer is thinning further.

Inside , the picture is starker. High rental costs and financial pressure push households to return from western areas to unsafe communities on the frontline – alongside the equally powerful pull of access to their own homes, familiar services, livelihoods, and family ties. For many households, the choice to return is a deliberate trade-off between physical risk and the opportunity to regain economic and social wellbeing.

Together, these trends underscore the financial burden of displacement, whether within or outside the country. As humanitarian assistance declines, insufficient financial support risks worsening living conditions for displaced people and may contribute to decisions to return to unsafe areas, raising important protection concerns.

Access the reports via the link in the first comment.

18/09/2026

16/09/2026

The newly published sixth edition of The State of the Humanitarian System report by ALNAP offers a timely warning. As resources shrink and the humanitarian system adapts to a period of contraction, we must be careful not to roll back some of the sector’s most important achievements.

Over the past decade, the humanitarian community has invested heavily in strengthening our understanding of needs, improving data systems, and listening more systematically to the priorities and preferences of affected populations. These efforts have not been perfect, but they have fundamentally improved how we understand crises and make response decisions.

However, these gains are under pressure. As the humanitarian system contracts we must preserve the critical capacities built over the past two decades, including robust information systems, strong accountability mechanisms and the standards that underpin effective, people-centred humanitarian action.

🔗 Access report: https://buff.ly/ur1raiw

The State of the Humanitarian System 2026 looks at the period from January 2022 to December 2025, as well as drawing comparisons with our previous editions to take a longitudinal view.

15/09/2026

As of 11 September 2026, the Ebola outbreak has expanded to 62 health zones across eight provinces in DRC, with 7,022 confirmed cases and 3,398 deaths.

IMPACT has produced a new regional mobility analysis, which highlights how population movements may contribute to the continued spread of Ebola Virus Disease (EVD) across northeastern Democratic Republic of the Congo and neighboring countries.

𝗞𝗲𝘆 𝗳𝗶𝗻𝗱𝗶𝗻𝗴𝘀:

🔴 𝗘𝘅𝗽𝗮𝗻𝘀𝗶𝗼𝗻 𝗶𝗻 𝗕𝗮𝘀-𝗨𝗲𝗹𝗲 𝗮𝗻𝗱 𝘁𝘄𝗼 𝗻𝗲𝘄 𝗽𝗿𝗼𝘃𝗶𝗻𝗰𝗲𝘀 𝗵𝗮𝘃𝗲 𝗯𝗲𝗲𝗻 𝗮𝗳𝗳𝗲𝗰𝘁𝗲𝗱: Affected areas of Bas-Uele province have expanded to three health zones (Buta, Ganga, Vladana), and new confirmed cases have been reported in Bulu Health Zone of Sud-Ubangi province. The continued expansion to new provinces highlights the continued challenges in response capacity and delayed detection.

🔴 𝗜𝗻𝗰𝗿𝗲𝗮𝘀𝗲𝗱 𝗿𝗶𝘀𝗸 𝗳𝗼𝗿 𝗰𝗿𝗼𝘀𝘀-𝗯𝗼𝗿𝗱𝗲𝗿 𝘁𝗿𝗮𝗻𝘀𝗺𝗶𝘀𝘀𝗶𝗼𝗻 𝘁𝗼 𝗖𝗲𝗻𝘁𝗿𝗮𝗹 𝗔𝗳𝗿𝗶𝗰𝗮𝗻 𝗥𝗲𝗽𝘂𝗯𝗹𝗶𝗰 𝗮𝗻𝗱 𝗦𝗼𝘂𝘁𝗵 𝗦𝘂𝗱𝗮𝗻: Confirmed cases in Sud-Ubangi and Bas-Uele provinces present two high-risk crossing points to Central African Republic at Bangui and Bangassou. Markets in Gemena Health Zone serve the wider region with trade connections to Kinshasha, Bangui, Nord-Ubangi, and more and has regular movement flows from the newly affected Bulu Health Zone. Livestock trading and movements between Sud-Ubangi, and Bangui peak during September via Zongo Health Zone, meaning health officials in Sud-Ubangi and in Bangui should consider monitoring livestock trade routes and sites as soon as possible.

🔴 𝗡𝗲𝗲𝗱 𝘁𝗼 𝗮𝗰𝘁𝗶𝘃𝗲𝗹𝘆 𝗶𝗱𝗲𝗻𝘁𝗶𝗳𝘆 𝗽𝗮𝗿𝘁𝗻𝗲𝗿𝘀 𝘁𝗼 𝘀𝘂𝗽𝗽𝗼𝗿𝘁 𝗽𝗿𝗲𝗽𝗮𝗿𝗲𝗱𝗻𝗲𝘀𝘀 𝗶𝗻 𝗮𝗿𝗲𝗮𝘀 𝗼𝗳 𝗱𝗼𝘄𝗻𝘀𝘁𝗿𝗲𝗮𝗺 𝗿𝗶𝘀𝗸: Given the pace of transmission to new areas, it is of immediate importance to work with partners to quickly expand PoE/PoC, surveillance capacity, and RCCE activities to not only recently affected provinces (Bas-Uele, Sud-Ubangi) but already to identify and work with partners to provinces of farther downstream risk such as Maniema, Nord-Ubangi, and Mongala.

The analysis reinforces the importance of targeted surveillance, risk communication and community engagement, and point of entry preparedness efforts while maintaining the movement and trade networks that are essential for local livelihoods.

Access the most recent mobility analysis in the first comment.

04/09/2026

From Evidence to Action: Key Insights from IMPACT’s 2025 MEAL Review

At IMPACT, we aim to apply the same evidence-driven approach to assessing our own performance as we do to our research.

Our 2025 Monitoring, Evaluation, Accountability and Learning (MEAL) Review provides valuable insights into the reach, quality, and use of our research, helping us strengthen our impact and continuously improve the way we work.

A few highlights from this year's review:

✅ More than 1,200 research products disseminated in 2025;

✅ Evidence informed humanitarian response and prioritization decisions in 77% of active crises;

✅ 75% of partners reported using IMPACT products for operational planning and strategic decision-making;

✅ More than 90% of partners rated our research as relevant, reliable, and high quality.

The review also points to key priorities for the future: improving the timeliness and accessibility of evidence, investing in more integrated and participatory research approaches, and strengthening how we measure performance, learn, and adapt.

As humanitarian needs continue to evolve, so must the way we generate and use evidence. These lessons will help ensure our research remains actionable, relevant, and responsive to decision-makers' needs.

Access the MEAL Review link in the first comment.

31/08/2026

RCA | Élaborer un Plan de Développement Local avec et pour les communautés

Dans la sous-préfecture de Bangassou, les besoins en matière de santé, d’accès à l’eau, d’hygiène et d’assainissement demeurent importants. Pour accompagner la commune dans la définition de ses priorités de développement, IMPACT, en partenariat avec Acted, a mené une évaluation territoriale visant à appuyer l’élaboration d’un Plan de Développement Local (PDL).

Cette démarche a mis en lumière plusieurs enseignements clés:

✅ Diversifier les sources d’information au-delà des seuls leaders communautaires afin de garantir une meilleure représentativité des points de vue et une évaluation plus inclusive des besoins.

✅ Restituer les résultats des évaluations aux autorités locales et aux communautés concernées pour favoriser leur validation, renforcer la transparence et encourager l’appropriation des futures interventions.

✅ Accompagner la transition de l’urgence vers le développement, lorsque le contexte le permet, afin de renforcer la durabilité des actions et de réduire la dépendance à l’aide humanitaire.

Le Plan de Développement Local qui résulte de ce processus constitue une véritable feuille de route, co-construite avec les communautés et les autorités locales. Il vise à orienter et coordonner les interventions, ainsi que mobiliser les financements nécessaires au développement durable de la commune.

🎬 Découvrez le témoignage de Mélodie Yeho, chargée d’évaluation, qui revient sur cette démarche et ses principaux enseignements.

📄 Consultez également le rapport complet pour en savoir plus.

Le projet a été soutenu par la France Diplomatie