CONCERN WORLDWIDE LBG

Their core work

Concern Worldwide is an international humanitarian NGO headquartered in Dublin, working across some of the world's most fragile and crisis-affected countries. Their core work involves emergency response, long-term development programming, and building community resilience in contexts of extreme poverty, conflict, and recurring natural disasters. In H2020 research consortia, they contributed as a practitioner partner — bringing field presence, operational knowledge, and access to crisis-affected communities that academic partners cannot replicate on their own. Their participation in projects on urban vulnerability and education-based resilience reflects their applied expertise at the intersection of humanitarian response and sustainable development.

What they specialise in

How they've shifted over time

With only two projects in a narrow 2016–2019 window, meaningful evolution is limited, but a directional shift is visible. The earlier PRUV project had no recorded keywords, suggesting a broader or exploratory framing around urban vulnerability. By BRTE, the focus had sharpened into a specific theory of change: education as the mechanism for building resilience in populations experiencing recurrent crises. This tightening of scope — from generic preparedness toward evidence-based educational capacity-building — suggests Concern was moving toward more programmatically focused research partnerships aligned with their field practice.

Concern appears to be positioning itself as a practitioner-research bridge specifically around education's role in crisis resilience — a niche where field NGOs with operational reach are scarce and therefore valuable to academic consortia.

How they like to work

Concern Worldwide has participated exclusively as a consortium partner, never as coordinator, across both H2020 projects. This reflects their typical role in EU-funded research: they are not research-led institutions but field-knowledge providers who ground academic work in operational reality. With 13 unique partners across 10 countries from just two MSCA-RISE projects, they engage in moderately large, internationally diverse consortia — consistent with the MSCA-RISE format, which requires multi-country staff exchanges and is well-suited to NGOs with global field offices.

Concern has built connections with 13 consortium partners across 10 countries through two MSCA-RISE projects. Their network likely spans European academic institutions and institutions in the Global South, consistent with MSCA-RISE's requirement for international staff mobility between programme and third countries.

What sets them apart

What sets Concern Worldwide apart from other NGOs or research organizations in this space is their operational footprint in genuinely hard-to-reach, crisis-affected countries — they are not a desk-based policy organization but a field-delivery NGO with staff on the ground in fragile states. For a research consortium that needs to ground its work in real-world crisis contexts, access to Concern's field networks, beneficiary communities, and implementation experience is difficult to source elsewhere. A consortium partner looking for credible humanitarian field expertise — not just literature — should treat Concern as a rare asset.

Highlights from their portfolio

• BRTE
  The longer-running and larger-budget project (2017-2022, EUR 139,500), BRTE directly operationalizes Concern's core theory of change — that education is a durable mechanism for resilience in populations facing recurrent crises, making it the clearest evidence of their research-practice integration.
• PRUV
  Concern's entry point into H2020 research, PRUV on urban vulnerability preparedness positioned them in the emerging research agenda around crisis-resilient cities — a topic increasingly relevant as urbanization accelerates in fragile-state contexts.