Evaluating Humanitarian Action Using the OECD-DAC Criteria-An ALNAP guide for humanitarian agencies

The ALNAP Review of Humanitarian Action has been monitoring the quality of evaluations of humanitarian action for the past five years. The positive news is that evaluations have become more deeply ingrained in the humanitarian sector. The not-so-good news is that the quality of the evaluations themselves still leaves much to be desired. The development of better evaluations is not just an end in itself: high-quality evaluations should have a positive effect on improving learning, accountability and performance in the sector. When the Joint Evaluation of Emergency Assistance to Rwanda was undertaken in 1995, there were no manuals, guidelines or good practice notes to follow on evaluating humanitarian action. Since then, some helpful materials have been published – notably Evaluating Humanitarian Assistance Programmes in Complex Emergencies (Hallam, 1998) and Guidance for Evaluating Humanitarian Assistance in Complex Emergencies (OECD-DAC, 1999). The first of these texts was aimed at evaluators, while the second was intended for commissioning agencies. This new ALNAP guide builds on the achievement of both publications by providing a framework designed to assist with the interpretation of key DAC criteria within a specifically humanitarian context. This will be of value to both evaluators and evaluation managers alike. Alongside other activities to improve evaluation, such as the ALNAP meta-evaluation and ALNAP evaluation training modules, this guide signals how far the evaluation community has come in pursuing quality in evaluation as a means of improving humanitarian performance. With other recent initiatives on evaluation quality and standards by both DAC and the UN, there are good grounds for expecting further improvements in the future.