This blog draws on an independent qualitative synthesis of feminist evaluation innovations in crisis contexts. The synthesis is part of From Insights to Action: Advancing Feminist Evaluation Innovations in Crisis Contexts, a project pursued independently by the author and supported through the Feminist Innovation in Monitoring and Evaluation (FIME) Small Grant for Young and Emerging Evaluators, administered by the Global Evaluation Initiative in partnership with EvalGender+ and Global Affairs Canada. This blog shares the cross-cutting lessons emerging from that work to contribute to ongoing conversations within the global evaluation community, including among those working in humanitarian settings.
Introduction: Why feminist evaluation matters in crisis settings
Humanitarian crises disrupt various aspects of daily life, but their effects are rarely experienced equally. During emergencies, women, girls, and other marginalized groups face heightened risks - limited mobility, increased unpaid care, interrupted services, and greater exposure to violence and exploitation. Displacement, loss of livelihoods, and strained protection systems compound these pressures, often leaving those most affected with the least opportunity to influence the very responses designed for them.
In many humanitarian settings, evaluations tend to centre on immediate relief metrics - how many meals were served, how many shelters were set up, how much cash was disbursed. Such numbers offer a sense of scale, but they do not probe the underlying equity dimensions: who was able to benefit, whose perspectives informed the response, whose insights were recognized, and whose needs may have gone unnoticed. Further, during crisis evaluations, safety concerns, mobility barriers, trauma, and cultural norms often restrict participation, especially for marginalized groups – including adolescent girls, women with disabilities, and caregivers. As a result, vital perspectives can remain unheard, and humanitarian assistance may risk overlooking differences in access, experience, and outcomes.
Feminist evaluation offers a practical way to address these gaps. It provides frameworks and tools to engage those most affected in meaningful and safe ways, ensuring their experiences shape evidence and decision-making. While recognizing the complexity of protracted crises, feminist evaluation strengthens the quality of evaluation findings by focusing on who participates, how they participate, and whether evaluation processes reflect the lived realities of people in crisis.
Feminist evaluation also shares many key features with other evaluation and research approaches - such as participatory, utilization-focused, transformative, realist, and decolonial methodologies - which similarly emphasize context, voice, justice, and systemic inquiry. In doing so, feminist approaches help evaluators understand not only what changed, but for whom and why. In crisis settings - where the needs of women and girls can shift rapidly - these insights are essential for designing responses that are equitable, responsive, and grounded in the priorities of those most at risk.
This blog draws on a qualitative synthesis of 17 feminist evaluations conducted between 2019 and 2024 across diverse crisis contexts, including displacement emergencies, public health outbreaks, climate-induced disasters, and economic crises. The purpose of the synthesis was to examine how feminist evaluation practices – rooted in principles such as power shifting, voice, and intersectionality - have been operationalized in evaluations conducted in crisis and emergency settings, and to generate practical insights for evaluators, institutions, and policy actors.
Lesson 1: Integration strengthens rigor and influence
A central lesson from the synthesis is that feminist evaluation is most effective when its principles are integrated across design, methods, analysis, and ethics, rather than applied as discrete techniques. At the same time, crisis conditions do not always allow feminist approaches to be applied at every stage of an evaluation. In such contexts, applying feminist principles where feasible - whether in design choices, data collection, analysis, or validation - can still add meaningful value.
Where integration was possible, feminist framing informed early design decisions, participatory approaches were aligned with analytical strategies, and ethical considerations shaped how data were collected and interpreted. While the strongest synergies and transformative potential emerged when feminist principles were embedded throughout the evaluation cycle, the synthesis suggests that even partial integration can strengthen rigor and responsiveness when applied thoughtfully and contextually.
Lesson 2: Shifting epistemic authority is the common denominator
Across the synthesis, a defining feature of feminist innovation was the intentional shift of epistemic authority toward crisis-affected populations. Rather than positioning external evaluators as the primary arbiters of evidence, evaluations created space for rights-holders to shape what was examined, how data were generated, and how findings were interpreted. This reorientation moved participation beyond consultation, reframing it as a process of shared knowledge production rooted in community voices and lived experience.
These shifts were not merely methodological adjustments; they altered how credibility and legitimacy were constructed within evaluations. When affected communities contributed to defining priorities and validating insights, evidence was more closely aligned with local realities and constraints. The synthesis suggests that relocating epistemic authority in this way strengthens both the relevance of findings and their potential to inform learning and decision-making in complex crisis settings.
Lesson 3: Ethics and intersectionality must drive analysis, not sit at the margins
The synthesis underscores the importance of treating intersectionality as a core analytical lens rather than a reporting requirement. While disaggregation by gender or age is common, feminist evaluations went further by examining how multiple identities - such as gender, disability, displacement status, and poverty -interacted to shape access, risk, and outcomes. This approach transformed analysis from descriptive accounts into explanations of how structural exclusion operates in crisis contexts.
Ethics similarly emerged as a methodological driver rather than a procedural safeguard. In volatile environments, ethical practice required continuous adaptation, shaping who could safely participate and how engagement was structured. Feminist approaches treated “do no harm” as integral to design and analysis, ensuring that participation, consent, and representation were responsive to shifting risks.
Lesson 4: Time, planning, and capacity are enabling conditions for participation
A further cross-cutting insight relates to the role of time, preparation, and capacity in enabling meaningful participation. The synthesis highlights that participatory and community-led approaches are most effective when timelines allow space for adequate preparation and engagement. Building trust and creating safe spaces for engagement requires deliberate planning, phased activities, and sustained interaction with participants.
Investing in community and local evaluator capacity also emerged as a critical enabler. Orientation and training supported more accurate use of tools, strengthened ethical practice, and improved the depth and reliability of findings. These investments enhanced methodological rigor while reinforcing feminist commitments to agency and respect. The lesson is clear: participatory feminist evaluation is not simply a matter of method choice, but of resourcing, planning, and institutional willingness to allow time for meaningful engagement.
Looking ahead: Strengthening practice through reflection
Taken together, these insights highlight ways feminist thinking can continue to strengthen evaluation practice in crisis settings. Flexible and adaptive designs can help evaluators respond to security, logistical, and contextual constraints, while keeping inclusion and agency in view and creating space for the meaningful inclusion of women’s and girls’ voices. Paying closer attention to participatory governance, intersectional analysis, and adaptive ethics may also make crisis evidence more relevant and rooted in lived experience. There is value in continued learning and capacity development around participatory facilitation and power-aware practice. Overall, the synthesis suggests that feminist evaluation is less about adopting a fixed set of tools, and more about cultivating the conditions - skills, systems, and ethical reflexivity - that allow equitable and context-responsive evidence to inform humanitarian action.
The opinions expressed on the UNICEF Blog are those of the author(s) and do not necessarily reflect the official position of UNICEF.
