European inter-university network specializing in humanitarian action education, crisis resilience training, and professional development for humanitarian workers.
NOHA is a European inter-university network dedicated to educating and training professionals for humanitarian action. Based in Belgium, it brings together universities across Europe to deliver joint academic programs — most notably a long-running joint Master's in International Humanitarian Action — that prepare graduates for careers in crisis response and development contexts. In H2020, their contribution has been as an education specialist: they join research and mobility projects to provide curriculum expertise, institutional reach across humanitarian studies departments, and connections to the field of international humanitarian practice. Their core value is not research output in the traditional sense but institutional knowledge of how to train people who work in fragile, crisis-affected environments.
Both DIRS and BRTE draw on NOHA's core identity as a network that trains humanitarian professionals, reflected in keywords spanning doctoral training, career paths, and educational capacity-building.
BRTE (Building Resilience through Education) focuses explicitly on recurrent crisis and resilience, positioning NOHA as a specialist in education as a tool for crisis response.
DIRS (Deusto International Research School, MSCA-COFUND) lists NOHA as a partner contributing to early-stage researcher training, career paths, and cross-sectoral employability.
DIRS keywords explicitly include interdisciplinarity, cross-sectorality, and the European Higher Education Area, reflecting NOHA's multi-university, multi-discipline program architecture.
NOHA's earliest H2020 engagement (DIRS, from 2016) was grounded in researcher development infrastructure — doctoral training, career paths, employability, and integration into the European Higher Education Area. By 2017, with BRTE, the focus shifted decisively toward applied humanitarian education in crisis contexts: recurrent crises, resilience, and development. This reflects a natural progression from building academic training pipelines to deploying those pipelines in real-world fragile settings. The trajectory suggests NOHA is moving away from generic researcher mobility and toward a more specialized niche at the intersection of education and humanitarian response.
NOHA is narrowing toward education-as-humanitarian-intervention — projects that use training and capacity-building as tools in crisis-affected or fragile development contexts, making them a natural partner for initiatives in conflict resilience, post-crisis recovery education, or global South capacity programs.
NOHA does not lead EU projects — both participations are as partner or third party, meaning they contribute expertise without taking on coordination responsibility. Despite this supporting role, they appear in consortia with a remarkably wide network: 47 unique partners across 11 countries from just two projects, which signals they are embedded in broad, well-connected consortia rather than small bilateral arrangements. Working with NOHA likely means gaining access to their inter-university humanitarian studies network, but not a project management lead.
NOHA has connected with 47 distinct consortium partners across 11 countries through only two projects — an unusually high partner density that reflects the large, multi-institutional MSCA consortia they join. Their network skews toward European universities and humanitarian-sector institutions, consistent with their inter-university network identity.
NOHA occupies a rare position in the EU research landscape: it is a dedicated inter-university network focused exclusively on humanitarian action education, rather than a general social science faculty or development studies department. This gives them credibility and connections that a single university cannot replicate when projects need to bridge academic training and humanitarian field practice. For consortium builders working on education in crisis contexts, displacement, or fragile-state capacity, NOHA brings both institutional legitimacy and a pre-built network of humanitarian studies departments across Europe.
