Listening in crisis: Strengthening UNICEF’s Sudan response
An influential, independent evaluation turned listening into action, helping UNICEF adapt and strengthen its emergency response for Sudan’s most vulnerable children.
Listening in Crisis: How Evaluation Strengthened UNICEF’s Response in Sudan
Amid one of the most complex and prolonged humanitarian crises in recent times, children in Sudan have endured extraordinary hardship. By the end of 2024, Sudan recorded the highest number of internally displaced people in the world. More than half of them were children, facing extreme risks from malnutrition, disease, and disruptions to their education.
When conflict intensified in April 2023, UNICEF made a decisive move. It activated its highest level of emergency response — the Level 3 Corporate Emergency Activation Procedure (L3 CEAP). This was not just a bureaucratic shift; it was a full mobilization of the organization, streamlining operations to deliver aid faster and more effectively. It was a critical shift in how UNICEF operated, both inside Sudan and across borders.
But the challenges were immense. With rapidly shifting frontlines, evolving community needs, the loss of UNICEF’s national office in Khartoum, and the forced relocation of staff, delivering for children became more complex than ever and access to communities became a daily gamble.
The Power of Asking Questions
Amid the chaos, UNICEF made a bold decision: to ask questions and listen. UNICEF commissioned an independent evaluation of its L3 response to ensure its efforts remained responsive and informed by the realities on the ground. It was not easy. The evaluators ventured into some of Sudan’s most inaccessible regions — Central Darfur, Blue Nile, South Kordofan, gathering voices from communities often left unheard. These were not just interviews; they were ethical, participatory consultations that placed local perspectives at the center of the evaluation.
The evaluation aimed to provide a clear, evidence-based picture of how UNICEF was responding to the crisis. It asked difficult but necessary questions: Was the response reaching those most in need? Were programming and partnerships adapting to the complexity of the context? What needed to change to deliver more equitable and effective results?
From learning to action
The answers led to action. The evaluation recommendations did not just sit in a report, they informed the response, providing timely, actionable insights that have helped adjust UNICEF’s programming and operations in Sudan. Several areas were strengthened as a direct result of the following evaluation recommendations:
- Equity and inclusion: Strengthen equity and inclusion efforts by prioritizing children with disabilities and adolescents, who were identified as underserved during the emergency response
- Humanitarian Access: Strengthen engagement with local actors and leverage their complementary capacities to broaden access and coverage across the country.
- Localization: Transition from transactional partnerships to strategic investments in local capacity, enabling communities to lead humanitarian efforts through inclusive dialogue and shared governance structures.
- Integrated programming and conflict sensitivity: Enhance inter-sectoral coordination and systematically integrate conflict analysis into programme design to mitigate risks and foster social cohesion.
A living input into immediate and future planning
The evidence generated by the evaluation also became a living input into the development of UNICEF Sudan’s new Country Programme Document (CPD), shaping results and resource plans and consultations with partners and Government. This was possible because of a strong, utilization-focused approach embedded throughout the evaluation process.
The process also sparked reflection, within the UNICEF Sudan Country Office (SCO), on the approaches to be adopted in future country-level evaluations: What could be done differently next time? The SCO began exploring more agile processes, and a greater reliance on national institutions, while remaining aligned with UNICEF’s Evaluation Policy.
Why this matters
“These lessons are not only vital for Sudan, but for UNICEF’s global emergency preparedness and response efforts. The evaluation is not the end of a process. It is part of our ongoing commitment to learning, improving and adapting. The learnings from this evaluation are also informing the development of UNICEF Sudan’s 2026-2028 Country Programme,” says Sheldon Yett, UNICEF Representative to Sudan.
