Save the Children’s Food Security and Livelihoods programming across the nexus: Portfolio Mapping

Project Description

Save the Children is a leading humanitarian and development child rights organization that strove to ensure all children are protected, educated, and healthy. Save the Children implements child-sensitive food security and livelihoods (FSL) programs to support these goals through discrete projects in many of the most food insecure places in the world.

In pursuit of its objectives to promote food security and household economic resilience, Save the Children used different approaches, modalities, and tools, with variations across the nexus (humanitarian, development, peacebuilding). Yet despite Save the Children’s long and significant efforts in FSL, knowledge gaps remained. In recognition of these gaps, Save the Children commissioned IRMA to conduct a rapid evidence mapping of the FSL portfolio. The main objective was to review the scope of the portfolio and explore how Save the Children implemented FSL programming. The portfolio mapping answered the following three questions:

  • WHAT approaches, modalities, and tools did Save the Children use for FSL programming?
  • HOW WELL did these approaches, modalities, and tools work?
  • WHAT learning did the evidence offer?

Current and recent Save the Children FSL programs were systematically reviewed using mixed methods, including coding in MaxQDA, and discussions with Save the Children International’s Food Security & Livelihoods Technical Working Group (TWG). A participatory feedback session was conducted at the end of the assignment.

IRMA’s team for this assignment included Lezlie Morinière, Hannah Vaughan-Lee, and Charlotte Gendre.