CPRC

Past: Ager’s research over the past twenty years has been focused on three major themes. The first theme involved studies of forced migration and its impact on psychosocial well-being. This includes work commissioned by major United Nations organizations (such as UNHCR and UNICEF) regarding the impact of development assistance to refugee populations (in countries ranging from Malawi to India), and also work addressing resettlement in developed settings (including the major Indicators of Integration study commissioned by the UK Home Office).  He chaired the Andrew Mellon Foundation funded Psychosocial Working Group, commissioning applied field studies in Guatemala, Bosnia, Cambodia, Burundi, Sri Lanka and Afghanistan (linking research groups at Columbia, Harvard, UPenn, Oxford and QMU with international NGOs including Save the Children, Christian Children’s Fund, Doctors without Borders, Mercy Corps and the International Rescue Committee).  This work established the first major conceptual analysis (and related policy guidance) on psychosocial intervention in complex emergencies. The second major theme of his work is addressing culturally appropriate means of assessing program effectiveness across a wide range of development and refugee contexts. This has involved work for a number of international organizations (including WHO, UNICEF, USAID, UK DFID, the European Union) on developing rigorous evaluation frameworks for humanitarian and development assistance programs. Work related to this theme has established the potential for rigorous, comparative assessment of program effectiveness across complex intervention contexts, providing a sound basis for policy and program decision-making. The third major theme of Ager’s work is promoting health research capacity within organizations and systems. This has involved a number of capacity developing initiatives in settings as varied as Nigeria, Malawi, Sri Lanka and Romania. He directed the UK DFID global health research program until 2005, commissioning a program of studies of over $80million per annum.

Present: Ager’s current research is principally focused on establishing effective population-scalable interventions for children in conflict and post-conflict settings. As Co-PI of the Care and Protection of Children Learning Network project funded by USAID, he is working to consolidate practitioner and policy expertise through Delphi and other consensus methodology studies, as well as engaging in applied field studies of child-focused population-based interventions in Sierra Leone, Liberia, Northern Uganda, Sri Lanka and Indonesia. This work is leading to methodological advances through such developments as participative ranking (a group method for determining priority needs and resources), the ‘neighborhood method’ (an efficient means of determining population prevalence rates for sensitive issues such as gender-based violence) and means of reconstructing baseline information for impact assessments using local seasonal calendars. In related work he is establishing guidelines for evaluation of psychosocial programming in emergency settings for UNICEF, and coordinating field review of an Inter-Agency Child Protection Assessment Toolkit. He is a member of the Migration group within CU’s Population Center, promoting the use of social capital analysis of resources supporting migrant integration (as documented in the framework recently published in the Journal of Refugee Studies).

Future: Ager is engaged with other members of the Program on Forced Migration and Health in establishing a multi-agency consortium advising UN and leading non-governmental agencies of evidence-based practice in promoting child protection amongst refugee and war-affected populations. This includes developing, piloting and evaluating field-based methodologies for collecting reliable data in unstable settings. He is working with researchers at CDC, Fuller Theological Institute, the University of Amsterdam and the Antares Foundation in development of a series of studies of the well-being of national staff working in humanitarian settings. He was appointed Executive Director of the MSPH Global Health Initiative in 2009, through which role he will be working to support development of a range of inter-disciplinary and inter-school studies of global health concerns from a population perspective.

Professor Ager's Departmental Biography Page