Feminist Evaluation in Fragile Settings: Why It Matters  More Than Ever

Rai Sengupta is one of the six awardees of the Feminist Innovation in Monitoring and Evaluation (FIME) Small Awards Program. Through the grant, she is developing a toolkit for feminist evaluation in crisis contexts. Rai is from India and works as an evaluation consultant with the United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF).

In humanitarian crises, evaluations are often focused on short-term relief outputs—meals distributed, shelters built, cash transfers issued. These figures provide a snapshot of activity, but obscure deeper questions of equity: who accessed support, whose voices shaped responses, and whose needs remained invisible. 

Traditional evaluation frameworks are often designed for stable settings where assumptions of safety and participation hold. In fragile contexts, these assumptions collapse. Displacement, insecurity, and unequal power dynamics mean that collected knowledge frequently reflects the views of the most visible groups—often men or community figures—while women, girls, and other marginalized people remain excluded. 

Feminist evaluation responds directly to these gaps. It grounds analysis in the lived realities of those most affected, challenges entrenched hierarchies, and redefines what counts as evidence. In crises, this approach transforms evaluation into a tool for justice, ensuring humanitarian responses are guided by equity and efficiency.
 

Crises magnify inequities
 

Crises—whether sparked by natural disasters, armed conflicts, pandemics, or political upheaval—deepen existing inequalities. Women and girls often face heightened risks of gender-based violence, restricted mobility, economic marginalization, and increased care burdens. For displaced populations, vulnerabilities multiply, ranging from limited legal protections to heightened exposure to exploitation. 

These impacts are both immediate and intergenerational, locking families into cycles of disadvantage. Evaluation that fails to account for gendered dynamics risks reinforcing inequality instead of disrupting it. 
 

Surface metrics obscure systemic inequities  

Evaluation in emergencies too often emphasizes outputs over outcomes. For example, a program may meet its target for training sessions but fail to ask whether women could attend safely, whether their priorities were considered, or whether participation led to empowerment. 

Barriers to inclusion also shape data collection. Safety risks, displacement, and trauma frequently prevent women and girls from contributing their perspectives. 

Donor-driven agendas may further skew evidence by privileging external indicators over community knowledge. As a result, evaluations risk offering partial accounts of crisis impacts and producing flawed evidence for future responses.
 

Why feminist evaluation offers a critical alternative 

Feminist evaluation provides a different lens, starting from the recognition that men, women, girls, boys, and people of all genders experience crises differently—and that inequalities related to race, class, disability, or sexuality intersect to shape those experiences. 

Key feminist evaluation principles include:
 

1. Valuing marginalized voices. Feminist approaches create structured spaces where excluded groups actively inform decisions and hold programs accountable. For example, recent evaluations in the Sahel and across Africa used innovative sampling and layered feedback to capture the perspectives of adolescent girls, refugees, and displaced women. 

2. Recognizing multiple ways of knowing. Beyond statistics, feminist evaluation values evidence grounded in lived experience, such as participatory video, story-based methods, or child-centered recall. These approaches capture trauma narratives, coping strategies, and grassroots insights often invisible in conventional frameworks. For example, the 2019 Community Action on Zika Project in Honduras and Colombia used participatory video and story-based methods to assess programs through the lens of lived experience.  

3. Challenging hierarchies. Feminist evaluation questions whose priorities shape evaluation agendas. By embedding co-creation with affected communities, evaluations can prevent donor frameworks from overshadowing local concerns. The 2021 UN Women evaluation of Syrian humanitarian programming applied a feminist lens, co-creating knowledge with women refugees and shifting power toward affected women and girls. 

4. Intersectionality. Women are not a single group. Feminist evaluation highlights diversity across identities and contexts, ensuring responses are not “one size fits all” but tailored to specific vulnerabilities and strengths. The 2020 European Civil Protection and Humanitarian Aid Operations evaluation in Nigeria used gender- and age-disaggregated analysis to uncover hidden patterns of vulnerability and ensure more tailored humanitarian responses. 

5. Evaluator as activist. Feminist evaluators consciously use evidence to challenge inequities and support systemic change. By partnering with women’s rights organizations, evaluations can amplify community-led initiatives and strengthen accountability. The 2024 Women’s Peace and Humanitarian Fund evaluation conducted site visits in Colombia, Moldova, and Uganda and partnered with women’s rights organizations, enabling women-led groups to engage directly in data collection and analysis. These principles reframe evaluation as part of humanitarian response itself—not just as a reporting tool. Reflection becomes action, because what we choose to measure or ignore shapes recovery. 
    

Toward just and rigorous evaluations in crises
 

Crises magnify inequities, and traditional evaluation approaches often magnify them further by overlooking the most marginalized. Feminist evaluation offers a way forward. By amplifying marginalized voices, challenging hierarchies, and broadening definitions of evidence, feminist evaluation transforms evaluations into spaces of empowerment rather than exclusion. 

In fragile settings, the stakes are too high to settle for surface metrics or partial truths. Now more than ever, evaluations must be both rigorous and just—evaluations that not only document change but actively drive it.