Steven Hansch

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Bio

Steven Hansch has been writing and teaching about U.S. foreign aid for forty years. He has taught fifty graduate-level courses about strategy, tactics and design of international aid projects, with a focus on humanitarian aid and crises, at Johns Hopkins, George Washington and Columbia schools of public health, and in the foreign affairs programs at Georgetown, American University, GW and the Monterey Institute for International Development. As well, he has designed, led or taught in roughly 25 training workshops for aid professionals and an equal number for military personnel. He is a frequent lecturer at conferences and schools including the Uniformed Services University of the Health Sciences. Many of these courses focus on epidemiology, food and nutrition.

He was worked in a range of emergencies and their aftermath, including Somalia, Sudan, Ethiopia, Rwanda, Burundi, Liberia, Bosnia, Kosovo, Sri Lanka, Central America, Colombia, and southern Africa, and including roughly 200 refugee and IDP camps. Mr. Hansch has worked for a wide range of nonprofit humanitarian organizations and think tanks, including the red cross, Unicef, WHO, Care, the International Rescue Committee, World Vision, Food Aid Management and the Refugee Policy Group. He has roughly 60 years of cumulative experience serving on nonprofit boards, including Relief International, Partners for Development, World Hunger Education Service, DARA, the Center for the Study of Societies in Crisis and the Humanitarian Times.

Since 2013 he has worked for the International Business & Technical Consultants, Inc (IBTCI) where he has led several evaluations, written technical sections of proposals for twenty projects and edited/contributed to many more. Having written several dozen other evaluations over the decades, he has contributed to raising over $100 million in funding. In recent years he has been involved in monitoring and verification programs for USAID in crises.

Expertise

Expertise:

Biostatistics

Community Health

Disaster Preparedness

Epidemiology

Evaluation Research

Global Health

Infectious Disease

Nutrition

Social Marketing

Education:

Mr. Hansch has specialty in the intersection of life-threatening illness, malnutrition, primary care, food aid and logistics of assistance. This includes planning field projects and evaluation of return on investment. Mr. Hansch began designing, leading and writing evaluations, particularly in humanitarian aid, in the early 1990s and has been active in the promotion of monitoring and evaluation standards through practitioner associations, including InterAction and the American Evaluation Association. He brings a deep and balanced understanding of the history of foreign assistance and humanitarian aid over many decades. He is an expert about the community of NGOs and how they differ in mandates, origins and operations. He became active in the Refugee Nutrition community in the 1980s and has been a routine participant in industry meetings involving sharing of lessons. He has organized a dozen major conferences to bring aid agencies together to share and solve persistent problems.

In his recent work with IBTCI, he has worked particularly in economic development, infrastructure, risk reduction, agriculture, feed the future, biodiversity conservation, climate change, basic and higher education and capacity building. He has authored or co-authored roughly two dozen proposals funded by USAID to provide monitoring, evaluation, knowledge management and learning for a range of USAID Missions, including a number of mission-wide M&E&L platforms. In 2015 and 2016 he directed routine data reporting and editing for approximately 2,200 pages for USAID about the effectiveness of its portfolio of relief and recovery programs in Yemen. In 2017 he is leading a large evaluation of USAID’s response to the Ebola outbreak in West Africa, examining USAID’s awards, modalities, strategy and coordination with partner agencies such as CDC and the Department of Defense.

Research

Research:

Mr. Hansch did his dissertation research in Central America, comparing the household livelihood, food economies, and malnutrition patterns in ten different refugee camps of Salvadorans, Guatemalans and Nicaraguans. Subsequently he has specialized in field evaluations in emergencies, conducting field work in Sudan, Ethiopia, Somalia (1993, 2006, 2011), Rwanda (1994/95), the tsunami of 2004, the Haitian earthquake (2010/2011), Yemen (2013-2016), etc.

In recent years he has been researching a history of USAID.

Publications

Publications:

Mr. Hansch has written several chapters and reports about the role of militaries in humanitarian aid.

Most of his writing focuses on the performance of humanitarian agencies in crisis response. This includes "Lives Lost, Lives Saved, an Evaluation of OFDA assistance in the 1992 Somali Famine", and more recently, the 2014 Summative Evaluation of OFDA and FFP portfolios in Yemen.

Mr. Hansch has been a contributor to (co-author) of each edition of the SPHERE humanitarian standards, starting in 1998. In 1999 he designed (with InterWorks) the curricula for in-house capacity building within the World Bank about working in conflict and post-conflict reconstruction.

In 2001 he edited the screenplay for the motion picture, Beyond Borders.

His research on the history of the US Agency for International Development is aimed toward a balanced, candid 300-page look at the patterns and trends in US assistance by decade, contintent and sector.

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Steven

Hansch

Lecturer

Steven Hansch

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