How can philanthropies ensure their investments are leading to real world impacts? R4D is partnering with the Hilton Foundation Refugees Initiative to strengthen learning, amplify grantee voices, and refine strategies to better support refugee children and their caregivers to thrive.
The Challenge: Ensuring Investments Deliver Impact for Refugees
Around the world, refugee families face profound barriers to stability and opportunity. Children under five — who represent a third of displaced populations — often lack access to quality early childhood development (ECD) services, while their caregivers struggle to secure dignified livelihoods. Too often, these dual challenges are addressed in isolation, despite clear evidence that family well-being requires holistic solutions that support children and their adult caregivers together.
To fill this gap, the Conrad N. Hilton Foundation launched its Refugees Initiative in 2021. The Initiative supports programs in Colombia, Ecuador, Ethiopia and Uganda that integrate services for children and caregivers in a novel “two-generation” approach.
But how can the Foundation ensure its investments translate into real impact? How can progress be measured while minimizing reporting burdens on grantees? And how can timely insights be generated in complex, resource-constrained settings?
The Opportunity: Strengthening Strategy, Learning and Evidence
These questions led the Hilton Foundation to partner with Results for Development (R4D) as a key learning partner to help refresh the Refugee Initiative’s strategy and develop a Strategic Learning Plan for its two-generation programming.
R4D is working with the Foundation and its grantees to:
- Develop an overarching learning system and synthesize evidence across the portfolio to inform strategic decision-making
- Identify and prioritize evidence gaps, measurement challenges, and high-potential learning opportunities
- Contribute to the global dialogue on how “two-generation” approaches are defined, measured, and adapted to refugee and migrant contexts
R4D’s Work: Partnering for Greater Impact
As the Refugees Initiative’s strategic learning partner, R4D takes a collaborative, participatory approach — amplifying grantee voices, reducing reporting burdens, and ensuring learning outputs reflect the realities of refugee and host communities.
Key areas of work include:
- Creating a framework for the Initiative that maps two-generation approaches that support both children and caregivers — this framework underpins portfolio-wide analysis
- Developing a shared theory of change to guide the Initiative’s portfolio and strategy, clarifying how investments link to child and caregiver outcomes
- Conducting thematic deep dives with grantees to synthesize evidence and generating insights on early childhood development, livelihoods, and integrated two-generation approaches
- Streamlining reporting systems to reduce burden for grantees while still generating critical evidence
