WAR CHILD Research and Development
My time at War Child was predominantly spent in the Research and Development department. The department was conceptualised and is led by Professor Mark Jordans of King’s College London and the University of Amsterdam.
The department consists primarily of researcher coordinators, who follow the Medical Research Council framework for developing and evaluating complex interventions to support children affected by conflict.
While my role transformed over the years, the purpose of my work remained to same; to support War Child’s capacity to design, evaluate and scale evidence-based interventions.
War Child
War Child’s vision is to ensure that all children affected by conflict have access to quality services to support their wellbeing. As an actor alone, War Child could never reach the hundreds of millions of children in need of care. As such, War Child develops evidence-based approaches to support children, and promotes uptake within the sector through partnering with international NGOs who have the reach.
Over the past ten years, War Child has invested in a range of evidence-based interventions to support the wellbeing of children affected by conflict across education, mental health and psychosocial support and child protection. Together these interventions and enabling tools form a multi-levelled, socio-ecological Care System, which can be culturally and contextually adapted.
My work
2019 - 2020
I started in the department as a research assistant, whose role was to aid the R&D department to function. The team needed executive administration support, as well as research support across research projects. Within this role I became familiar with both the content of each intervention and the research processes involved in designing, feasibility testing and evaluating complex interventions, as well as the management of the department.
Within this role, I supported with systematic reviews and instrument scoping reviews, created informational briefs for each intervention, co-developed the data management policy and plan and the set up a departmental library system. Executive assistance tasks included general support the the Director of R&D, supporting coordination of regular financial and narrative reporting, the planning of strategic team meetings and days, as well as knowledge management of the SharePoint site.
2020 - 2022
From here, I was promoted to the role of research dissemination officer. Within this position, I co-developed the department’s first research communications strategy, developed intervention one-pagers, and wrote research dissemination briefs - translating research findings to a broad audience. I worked to ensure that a dedicated section of the organisation website was published focusing on the Care System and was involved in the site design and copy-edit. Alongside this, I continued the responsibilities of the research assistant position, for instance contributing to UNICEF’s State of the World’s Children report (2021) and continuing to support the department in knowledge management, administration and operations.
A strategic piece of work I was involved in was coordinating the organisation’s Theory of Change and a redefinition of the Care System. This involved designing and executing a participatory process with leadership, technical specialists and programme teams in the organisation - across nine different country offices. Within the next strategic period, War Child leadership decided to prioritise the adoption of the redefined Care System, meaning that evidence-based interventions, best-practices and practice driven innovations would be integrated in country-offices’ programme portfolios. Evidence-based interventions were ear-marked for scaling through global partnerships.
2022 - 2024
There was a need for a new position in the organisation to facilitate and promote the adoption of evidence-based interventions in the organisation and sector wide, and I was hired as the R&D scaling coordinator. This was a strategic role in the organisation and the work was fluid and varied. It required a proactive and creative approach to design pragmatic solutions to challenges in the organisation and encourage uptake of evidence-based interventions within the Care System in the organisation and with large-scale international partners.
Within this role, I became a very familiar face across the organisation, as I worked with most (if not all) departments and country offices. I worked closely with technical specialists to support designing and implementing scalable solutions for learning and in quality monitoring of evidence-based practice at scale. I was a core component of working-groups conceptualising the organisational change needed to support the organisation's ambitions. My task-list expanded across programme design, grant-writing and fundraising, internal and external communications, to legal and licensing, to partnership development and management. I co-led the development of cultural and contextual guidelines for mental health interventions and designed toolkit guidelines across the Care System, to promote quality and standardisation.
Alongside these responsibilities, I became a master-trainer for the ReachNow tool. ReachNow promotes community-level proactive detection of children’s mental health needs and supports the encouragement of help seeking. The tool has been demonstrated to be accurate in supporting people who work with children without a mental health background to identify the signs of severe distress in children and effective in increasing utilisation of mental health services. Within this role, I trained trainers in Kyiv, Bucharest, Milan, Athens, Amman and Amsterdam. I ascertained and managed an EU4Health project scaling the ReachNow tool, which included co-leading the design of a blended e-learning path for trainers of the tool.
In 2024, I was asked to be seconded to the humanitarian emergency response team to lead programme development and fundraising for the Gaza humanitarian response. This position was a part-time function based in Amman whereby I contributed to obtaining 3.5 million euro in first-time funding from DG ECHO.
Selected sample outputs
The ReachNow tool visual development, blended learning path and toolkit
Guidebook to research and development
War Child’s Care System approach