RESEARCH IN PRACTICE Open Access Researching the delivery of health and nutrition interventions for women and children in the context of armed conflict: lessons on research challenges and strategies from BRANCH Consortium case studies of Somalia, Mali, Pakistan and Afghanistan Michelle F. Gaffey 1* , Anushka Ataullahjan 1 , Jai K. Das 2 , Shafiq Mirzazada 3 , Moctar Tounkara 4 , Abdirisak A. Dalmar 5 and Zulfiqar A. Bhutta 1,2 Abstract Background: The BRANCH Consortium recently conducted 10 mixed-methods case studies to investigate the provision of health and nutrition interventions for women and children in conflict-affected countries, aiming to better understand the dominant influences on humanitarian health actors’ programmatic decision-making and how such actors surmount intervention delivery barriers. In this paper, the research challenges encountered and the mitigating strategies employed by the case study investigators in four of the BRANCH case study contexts are discussed: Somalia, Mali, Pakistan and Afghanistan. Discussion: Many of the encountered research challenges were anticipated, with investigators adopting mitigation strategies in advance or early on, but others were unexpected, with implications for how studies were ultimately conducted and how well the original study aims were met. Insecurity was a fundamental challenge in all study contexts, with restricted geographical access and concerns for personal safety affecting sampling and data collection plans, and requiring reliance on digital communications, remote study management, and off-site team meetings wherever possible. The need to navigate complex local sociopolitical contexts required maximum reliance on local partners’ knowledge, expertise and networks, and this was facilitated by early engagement with a wide range of local study stakeholders. Severe lack of reliable quantitative data on intervention coverage affected the extent to which information from different sources could be triangulated or integrated to inform an understanding of the influences on humanitarian actors’ decision-making. (Continued on next page) © The Author(s). 2020 Open Access This article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License, which permits use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons licence, and indicate if changes were made. The images or other third party material in this article are included in the article's Creative Commons licence, unless indicated otherwise in a credit line to the material. If material is not included in the article's Creative Commons licence and your intended use is not permitted by statutory regulation or exceeds the permitted use, you will need to obtain permission directly from the copyright holder. To view a copy of this licence, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/. The Creative Commons Public Domain Dedication waiver (http://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0/) applies to the data made available in this article, unless otherwise stated in a credit line to the data. * Correspondence: michelle.gaffey@sickkids.ca 1 Centre for Global Child Health, The Hospital for Sick Children, 686 Bay St, Toronto, ON M5G 0A4, Canada Full list of author information is available at the end of the article Gaffey et al. Conflict and Health (2020) 14:69 https://doi.org/10.1186/s13031-020-00315-8