Feminist evaluation methods in crisis contexts: Contributing to unearth hidden realities

Eval4Action
10h
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By Rai Sengupta

Evaluation Consultant, UNICEF Evaluation Office

This blog draws on findings from a synthesis of feminist evaluation innovations in crisis contexts, conducted as part of the ‘From Insights to Action: Advancing Feminist Evaluation (FE) Innovations in Crisis Contexts’ project, funded by the Feminist Innovations in Monitoring and Evaluation (FIME) Award of the Global Evaluation Initiative (GEI). The author, Rai Sengupta, is one of six global Young Evaluation Entrepreneurs (YEEs) to receive the FIME award. Rai is also an evaluation consultant with the UNICEF Evaluation Office, supporting UNICEF Headquarters in conducting global evaluations of UNICEF’s work in nutrition and health, child protection, climate change, and WASH.

The value of feminist evaluations in crisis contexts

In humanitarian emergencies, evaluations often focus on quantifiable outputs - meals distributed, shelters erected, or families receiving cash transfers. While useful for rapid reporting, such figures overlook critical issues of fairness and access. They rarely ask whose voices shaped interventions, whose knowledge was privileged, and whose urgent needs slipped through the cracks.

These gaps reflect deeper design issues. Conventional evaluation models were built for stable contexts, assuming safety, access, and broad participation. In crises marked by conflict, displacement, epidemics, or disasters, those assumptions collapse. What remains is a partial evidence base shaped by the most visible informants - often men or community leaders with authority - while those most affected, especially women, girls, and disadvantaged groups, are systematically excluded from accounts of what “worked” or “failed.”

Feminist evaluation contributes to filling this gap. It challenges the idea of neutrality by recognising that evaluation is inherently political, capable of either reinforcing or disrupting entrenched hierarchies. By centring equity, it values diverse ways of knowing, situates evidence in context, and amplifies silenced voices. In doing so, it redefines what counts as evidence, who generates it, and how it drives justice.

In crisis settings - where access, power, and safety determine who speaks - feminist innovations are essential. They turn evaluation from a narrow measurement exercise into a tool for accountability, equity, and change. This blog highlights feminist evaluation methods - including equity-driven sampling, arts-based tools, participatory approaches, and community validation - which surface hidden realities and challenge structural inequities.

Feminist sampling approaches: Reaching hidden voices

In conflict or displacement contexts, conventional sampling often overlooks parts of the population, leaving some groups less visible. Feminist evaluation reframes sampling as an ethical act, deliberately including those most silenced - such as women heads of household, adolescent girls, or people with disabilities. By embedding equity into recruitment, feminist evaluators expand representation, challenge structural barriers, and make findings more credible and accountable.

For example, in evaluating humanitarian programming for refugees in Nigeria, the European Commission Civil Protection and Humanitarian Aid (2020) employed beneficiary-led snowball sampling to reach otherwise excluded groups. Similarly, during the Central Sahel displacement crisis, UNHCR (2023) used Respondent-Driven Sampling to access networks of women and adolescents who would have otherwise been unreachable.

Arts-based and visual methods: Centering self-representation

Surveys and structured interviews may falter in emergencies, especially with participants facing trauma or language barriers. Visual and arts-based methods - such as participatory video, photo walks, or drawing exercises - offer safer, less extractive ways for participants to express experiences. Rooted in feminist principles, these techniques redistribute narrative authority, validating emotion and memory as knowledge. In volatile settings, they create culturally sensitive, women- and child-friendly spaces where hidden experiences can surface without fear. When using these methods, key considerations include safeguarding confidentiality, ensuring cultural relevance, and managing ethical concerns around emotional exposure.

Notably, during the Zika epidemic in Honduras and Colombia, the International Federation of Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies (2019) used participatory video to enable communities to film and validate their own stories. In UNICEF’s 2024 evaluations of humanitarian programming during Cholera and Cyclone Freddy in Mozambique and Malawi, child-centred simulated recall allowed children to act as primary narrators. Through drawings and guided recollections, children’s perspectives were foregrounded and legitimized as essential evaluation evidence.

Participatory tools for defining change: Capturing complex realities

Crisis contexts generate complex, non-linear changes that escape narrow quantitative metrics. Feminist evaluation employs participatory tools like Most Significant Change (MSC), Outcome Harvesting (OH), and Outcome Mapping (OM), which ask communities - particularly women and girls - to define what meaningful change looks like. Such methods resist top-down definitions of success and produce layered explanations grounded in lived experience. They recognize that change must be understood on multiple levels: personal, household, communal, and systemic.

For instance, during Uganda’s refugee crisis, CARE International (2021) applied MSC to capture women’s stories of adaptation and leadership. During COVID-19 disruptions in the Middle East and Africa, Plan International (2023) drew on MSC to highlight adolescent girls’ own accounts of educational resilience. By enabling women and girls to define and narrate change themselves, these methods captured complex, gendered realities of resilience and adaptation that would have remained inaccessible through conventional evaluation methods.

When applying participatory tools in crisis contexts, it is important to consider logistical constraints, security risks, and limited access to affected populations. Effective facilitation requires specially trained personnel capable of gathering data on and interpreting complex outcomes. Additionally, power dynamics, participant trust, and trauma necessitate sensitive, adaptive approaches and strong ethical safeguards to ensure meaningful and respectful engagement.

Community validation and feedback loops: Returning knowledge

Too often, crisis evaluations extract knowledge without returning it to those who shared it. Feminist evaluation is an evaluation approach that actively embeds reciprocity, ensuring findings are validated collectively and used within communities, not just for external audiences. Feedback loops reinforce accountability, balance power dynamics, and build trust where it is fragile, making communities co-interpreters of evidence rather than passive informants. This requires deliberate efforts to share knowledge transparently and foster reciprocal relationships that promote accountability and equitable power sharing.

A relevant example comes from an evaluation during Lebanon’s economic contraction and the COVID-19 pandemic, where Search for Common Ground (2022) ran separate validation workshops with beneficiaries and staff to reduce hierarchies in sense-making. Similarly, the Women’s Peace and Humanitarian Fund (2024) conducted in-situ community validation in Colombia, Moldova, and Uganda, ensuring local women’s organisations directly shaped the interpretation of findings on humanitarian programming.

Toward transformational change

Each of these methods - innovative sampling, arts-based and visual tools, participatory approaches to defining change, and community validation - demonstrates how feminist principles can fundamentally reshape crisis evaluation. These are not incremental tweaks but deep transformations in how evidence is produced, validated, and used. Embedding feminist principles allows evaluators to confront entrenched inequities, elevate silenced voices, and redistribute power, making evaluation a part of the crisis response.

In volatile environments where structural injustice is laid bare, feminist evaluation contributes to reframing evidence as more than a record of outputs - it becomes a vehicle for accountability, justice, and collective voice. It uncovers truths that conventional methods cannot, challenges whose knowledge counts, and insists that those most affected are central to defining impact. In this way, feminist evaluation transforms the evaluation process into an act of activism, positioning evidence as a driver of systemic change rather than a neutral by-product of humanitarian action.

Rai Sengupta is an Evaluation Consultant with UNICEF’s Evaluation Office, supporting global evaluations in health, child protection, and climate-WASH. With 6+ years’ experience evaluating large-scale development programmes, she is a recipient of the Global Evaluation Initiative’s Feminist Innovations in M&E Award and leads work on feminist evaluation in crisis contexts.

References

CARE International. (2021). A lifesaving GBV, women’s leadership, and SRMH support for refugees: Endline evaluation report – Arua District, West Nile, Uganda. CARE International.
European Commission Civil Protection and Humanitarian Aid (ECHO). (2020). Integrated GBV prevention and response to the emergency needs of newly displaced women, men, girls, and boys in Borno State, North-East Nigeria: Mid-term evaluation report. ECHO.
International Federation of Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies (IFRC). (2019). Community action on Zika project in Honduras and Colombia: Participatory video evaluation report. IFRC.
Plan International. (2023). Meesa report: An evaluation of adolescent girls and young women’s continued access to education during COVID-19 in the Middle East, East, and Southern Africa (March 2020–March 2021). Plan International.
Podems, D. R. (2010). Feminist evaluation and gender approaches: There’s a difference? Journal of MultiDisciplinary Evaluation, 6(14), 1–17.
Search for Common Ground. (2022). Midterm evaluation: Partners for justice – Lebanon humanitarian response. Search for Common Ground.
Seigart, D. (2005). Feminist theory and evaluation.
Sielbeck-Bowen, S., Brisolara, S., Seigart, D., Tischler, C., & Whitmore, E. (2002). Exploring feminist evaluation.
UNHCR. (2023). Evaluation of UNHCR’s response to multiple emergencies in the Central Sahel region: Burkina Faso, Niger, Mali. UNHCR.
UNICEF. (2024a). Evaluation of UNICEF’s response to the Level 2 cholera and Cyclone Freddy emergencies in Mozambique. UNICEF.
UNICEF. (2024b). Evaluation of UNICEF’s response to the Level 2 cholera and Cyclone Freddy emergencies in Malawi. UNICEF.
Women’s Peace and Humanitarian Fund (WPHF). (2024). Final evaluation report: Women’s Peace and Humanitarian Fund 2019–2023. WPHF.

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