Voices from ALNAP’s first 25 years | Dr Hugo Slim: “Thanks to ALNAP, we can look at ourselves in the mirror every few years in the State of the Humanitarian System Report”

Dr Hugo Slim, Senior Research Fellow at Las Casas Institute for Social Justice, Blackfriars Hall, University of Oxford, on his experience with our network and hopes for ALNAP’s future. Read more testimonials from our 'Voices from ALNAP's first 25 years' blog series.

Thank heavens for ALNAP! Where would we be without Evalmapper’s one-stop shop for hundreds of evaluations of humanitarian aid? And how would we keep up with each new crisis without the ALNAP portals giving us all access to real-time learning from current emergencies and key topics like climate aid and urban response? 

I remember when there was no ALNAP and evaluations were distributed, or not, as bulky printed reports which landed on your desk with a dusty and ominous thud, which instantly dissuaded you from reading them. 

Every humanitarian can read every humanitarian evaluation. Better still they can let ALNAP’s brilliant researchers do all the work and simply read ALNAP’s boiled down lessons learnt, which come ready-made with actionable recommendations.

Twenty five years later, every humanitarian can read every humanitarian evaluation. Better still they can let ALNAP’s brilliant researchers do all the work and simply read ALNAP’s boiled down lessons learnt, which come ready-made with actionable recommendations. Thanks to ALNAP, we can also look at ourselves in the mirror every few years in the State of the Humanitarian System Report which tells us important things about the quality, performance and direction of humanitarian aid today.

We need ALNAP to join up more with other knowledge centres around the world where people are also creating the big data we will need for the increasingly big operations of the twenty first century.

ALNAP has transformed the archiving, access and learning around humanitarian evaluations through their curation of retrospective and real-time studies. We need them to do even more in the next twenty five years on important new challenges like climate humanitarianism, the digitalization of aid, humanitarian power-sharing, and greater understanding of other humanitarian systems in our multipolar world. And we need ALNAP to join up more with other knowledge centres around the world where people are also creating the big data we will need for the increasingly big operations of the twenty first century.