Steven Hansch
Steven Hansch
Lecturer
School: Milken Institute School of Public Health
Department: Global Health
Contact:
School of Medicine & Health Sciences
2300 I (Eye) Street, NW
Washington DC 20052
Steve Hansch has been writing and teaching about international public health, hunger, humanitarian crises and U.S. foreign aid for five decades, including over a hundred graduate-level courses about the design of projects, with a focus on humanitarian aid, nutrition and crises. He has organized numerous symposia or conferences for learning lessons across the practitioner community. Topics have included: NGO lessons of the Ebola pandemic response; Fortification of emergency food aid; The effectiveness of psychosocial disabilities in crises; Planning humanitarian response in Iraq; Basic education for children in emergencies; and Lessons of the Indian Ocean Tsunami Response.
He has been based in the Global Health Department at GW’s School of Public Health since 2007, he also taught at the Elliot School for International Affairs from 2000 on, and the School of Engineering.
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 internally displaced camps. Mr. Hansch has worked for a wide range of nonprofit humanitarian organizations and think tanks, including the Red Cross, Compassion International, CARE, the International Rescue Committee, World Vision, Corus, World Relief, Food Aid Management and the Refugee Policy Group as well as Unicef, WHO, and UNOPs. He has decades of volunteer service on non-profit boards, including Relief International, Partners for Development, World Hunger Education Service, DARA, and Trees for the Future. He has been contributing author/editor for the SPHERE humanitarian standards for emergency response in each of its four editions since 1997. He was a regular contributing member of InterAction working group from the 1980s until early 2010s when InterAction moved to ban volunteers and board members. He is a regular member of other peer-learning networks, such as CORE (health), ALNAP (humanitarian aid) and the American Evaluation Association.
In recent decades he has led numerous evaluations of foreign aid including evaluations and third-party monitoring for USAID’s Bureau for Humanitarian Assistance, as well health, public financial management, basic education and food aid. In 2005 he led the humanitarian and development aid sector component of the inter-agency evaluation of the UN system for US Congress. In 2017/2018 he led the evaluation of the US Government’s response to the Ebola outbreak in West Africa.
At GW he has produced a series of case studies of difficult choices faced in field implementation in NGO humanitarian response, including managing disease prevention, famine response, fulfilling neutrality/impartiality principles, drug supplies, landmine mitigation, and other topics in emergencies. In 2024 he joined GW’s new Global Food Institute as affiliate faculty. Previously, he taught for 12 years each at Johns Hopkins School of Public Health and Georgetown University, and five years at Columbia and Stanford Universities.
Biostatistics
Community Health
Disaster Preparedness
Epidemiology
Evaluation Research
Global Health
Infectious Disease
Nutrition
Social Marketing
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.
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.
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.
PUBH 6480: Public Health in Humanitarian Settings
PUBH 6462: Food and Nutrition in Large Humanitarian Emergencies
Previously also courses about disaster mitigation and response at the Elliot School, School of Engineering and School of Geography