Velina Stoianova

I have always been passionate about studying donors’ policies, analysing the implementation of lessons learnt and good practice, and understanding private humanitarian donorship.

I am passionate about understanding private humanitarian donorship.

Velina is a political scientist with a specialisation in International Relations from the Autonomous University of Barcelona and has worked as a researcher on humanitarian action in Spain and the United Kingdom for the past seven years. Her work focuses on the analysis of private funding in humanitarian aid and the implementation of the principles and good practice of humanitarian donorship. She conducted field studies in Sub-Saharan Africa, the Caribbean, the Middle East and Southeast Asia.

Between 2005 and 2007, Velina worked as an associate researcher at DARA. There, she participated in the Tsunami Evaluation Coalition and was part of the team that developed the original Humanitarian Response Index. She also worked for over four years at FRIDE, conducting policy research into the effectiveness of Spanish Humanitarian Policy.

In 2010, she moved to the United Kingdom to work as a policy advisor for the Global Humanitarian Assistance programme (GHA), a development initiative. She led GHA’s work in the area of humanitarian delivery, scale of needs and private voluntary contributions. She was also responsible for providing technical assistance to the Good Humanitarian Donorship group with the aim of developing a new accountability mechanism to track donors’ compliance with the 23 principles and good practices of humanitarian donorship.

Within Dahlia, Velina will particularly be involved in the areas of humanitarian studies and evaluation.

Policy research into the effectiveness of Humanitarian Policy.