RESUMO
Aid workers offer important perspectives for understanding better the most pervasive challenges that arise when implementing emergency response programming in humanitarian settings. This large sample study provides a global review of these perspectives, derived from 4,679 applications to the National NGO Program on Humanitarian Leadership, in which aid workers were asked to respond to the following question: 'What do you consider to be the biggest challenges in the implementation of emergency response programming in today's humanitarian settings?'. Through a qualitative coding process, the research team identified 14 major challenges that were prevalent across the applicants' responses and cross-tabulated these with their demographics. Coordination (30 per cent) and operating environment (29.5 per cent) were the most frequently reported. The study found a significant association between challenges identified and certain demographic variables. The results supplement a body of literature that is largely composed of small-scale, context-specific studies in which disaggre-gation of data by demographics is not possible.