Yulye Jessica Romo Ramos (Co-lead of the EES’ thematic working group 1: “Equity & Gender” and Director of Nexus Evaluation) organised and moderated a webinar with Rai Sengupta (Evaluation Consultant, UNICEF Evaluation Office and recipient of the Global Evaluation Initiative’s Feminist Innovation in Monitoring and Evaluation Small Grant Award) as guest speaker, who shared their most recent work in building a Feminist Evaluation Toolkit for crisis contexts. In this blog, we summarise and highlight key messages for anyone interested in feminist evaluation in crisis settings. 

Introduction 

Evaluating programmes in crisis contexts is rarely straightforward. In humanitarian and fragile settings, evaluations are often conducted under extreme time pressure and in conditions marked by insecurity and risk. As a result, many evaluations understandably focus on what can be counted quickly: how many shelters were built, how many people received food, how many services were delivered.

Yet, in doing so, evaluations tend to miss out on addressing some vital questions: Which groups were able to use these services in reality? Whose perspectives influenced programme choices? And which voices remained absent – intentionally or otherwise? Many established evaluation frameworks are designed for contexts marked by relative stability and safety, where participation is assumed rather than negotiated. When applied to volatile and insecure environments, these assumptions quickly unravel.

Why crisis contexts demand a feminist lens

Crises intensify existing gender inequalities. In crisis settings, women and girls face heightened exposure to gender-based violence, increased unpaid care responsibilities, restricted mobility, and loss of livelihoods, while displaced and refugee populations encounter additional layers of legal precarity and exploitation. These effects are rarely short-lived; they are systemic issues that often persist across generations, shaping who can access assistance and whose needs remain unmet. Yet crisis evaluations frequently prioritise measuring outputs over outcomes, documenting what was delivered rather than examining power dynamics, who benefited, who could participate safely, and whether gains were sustained beyond immediate relief. Structural barriers — including insecurity, trauma, fear of reprisal, and restrictive social norms — further limit whose voices enter the evidence base, resulting in findings that reflect more visible and accessible stakeholders – such as men and community representatives – rather than women, girls, and marginalised groups.

Feminist evaluation responds to these limitations by placing power, equity, and inclusion at the centre of evaluative inquiry. It moves beyond treating gender as a variable and instead asks who defines success, whose knowledge is recognised as evidence, and how intersecting inequalities shape outcomes. By valuing lived experience alongside quantitative data, feminist evaluation broadens what counts as credible evidence — a critical shift in contexts marked by disruption and trauma. It also challenges hierarchical decision-making by scrutinising whose priorities drive evaluation agendas and whether women-led and marginalised groups meaningfully influence the interpretation and use of findings. In fragile settings, this kind of reframing transforms evaluation from a narrow assessment of performance into a tool for accountability, learning, and social justice.

However, for many evaluators, applying feminist principles in emergency settings raises practical concerns: whether such approaches are feasible under severe time pressure, acceptable within donor accountability frameworks, and implementable without compromising rigour. These uncertainties are reinforced by the limited availability of consolidated, practice-oriented guidance on feminist evaluation in crisis contexts. This gap has constrained systematic uptake, leaving evaluators supportive in principle but unsure how to operationalise feminist approaches safely and credibly.

Introducing the Feminist Evaluation in Crisis Toolkit

The Feminist Evaluation in Crisis Toolkit was developed to address a clear and persistent gap: the absence of practical, consolidated guidance on how feminist evaluation principles can be applied credibly and safely in crisis and humanitarian settings. The Toolkit was developed under the project From insights to action: Advancing feminist evaluation innovations in crisis contexts, one of six global initiatives supported through the Feminist Innovation in Monitoring and Evaluation (FIME) Small Grant for Young and Emerging Evaluators, implemented by the Global Evaluation Initiative with the generous financial support of Global Affairs Canada and in collaboration with EvalGender+. 

The Toolkit responds to evaluators’ need for approaches that are both power-aware and workable under conditions of insecurity, time pressure, and constrained access. It is intended for use across a range of crises — from sudden-onset disasters to protracted conflict and displacement — and is relevant for evaluations conducted during emergencies as well as in post-crisis contexts.

What makes the Toolkit valuable — and different

For evaluators navigating complex and fragile environments, the Toolkit offers a distinctive value proposition:

• First-of-its-kind, crisis-focused feminist evaluation guidance: The Toolkit is among the first resources to explicitly operationalise feminist evaluation principles for crisis and humanitarian contexts, moving beyond conceptual discussion to applied, context-sensitive guidance.
• Co-created with practitioners and institutions: The Toolkit was developed collaboratively with feminist evaluators, women’s rights and women-led organisations, and refined through consultations with research organisations and the evaluation arms of multilateral institutions (including EES’s Thematic Working Group 1: Equity & Gender, the UNICEF Evaluation Office, UN Women Independent Evaluation Service, World Bank’s Independent Evaluation Group, and Asian Development Bank’s Independent Evaluation Department) – thereby enhancing its credibility and usability.
• Builds on existing global evaluation guidance: Rather than introducing an entirely new framework, the Toolkit synthesises and adapts established humanitarian evaluation and gender-transformative and feminist evaluation guidance, reducing the learning curve and supporting easier uptake within existing evaluation systems.
• End-to-end support across the evaluation cycle: It provides practical guidance across all stages of evaluation — from planning and design to methods, analysis, ethics, and dissemination – bringing these elements together in a single, one-stop shop that enables evaluators to integrate feminist principles systematically rather than as an afterthought.
• Designed for real-world constraints: Recognising limited time, access, and data availability, the Toolkit offers adaptable entry points. Evaluators can apply feminist approaches at one or multiple stages of an evaluation, depending on what is feasible, without compromising credibility.
• Grounded in lived experience and applied case studies: Drawing on a synthesis of feminist evaluation innovations from crisis-affected contexts, the Toolkit includes real-world case examples that show how feminist evaluation has been implemented in practice, highlighting adaptations, trade-offs, and lessons learned rather than idealised models.

Together, these features position the Feminist Evaluation in Crisis Toolkit as a practical resource for evaluators who want to move beyond documenting delivery to understanding impact – and to do so in ways that are methodologically sound, ethically grounded, and responsive to the realities of crisis contexts.

What this looks like in practice: Operationalising feminist evaluation across the Toolkit

Beyond its overall design, the Toolkit makes feminist evaluation actionable by embedding specific tools, methods, and decision points across the evaluation cycle. These are not simply examples of generic good practice; they reflect distinctly feminist shifts in how evaluations are framed, conducted, and used — particularly in how they centre power, voice, and lived experience.

• Planning feminist evaluations in crisis settings requires more than adapting standard evaluation processes to difficult environments. It involves making deliberate choices about whose priorities shape the evaluation from the outset and how power dynamics are addressed during planning. In Section 3, the Toolkit encourages rapid and collaborative planning approaches, including early stakeholder engagement, adaptive structures, and crisis-sensitive evaluation questions. A particularly important recommendation is the establishment of a dedicated gender working group (Section 3.3) to help maintain a feminist lens throughout the evaluation process. Rather than functioning as a conventional advisory mechanism, the group is intended to continuously interrogate power dynamics, shape gender-transformative questions, and strengthen intersectional analysis. The feminist evaluation question bank (Section 3.5) further supports this by offering adaptable questions focused on voice, participation, exclusion, and decision-making power across different crisis settings.
• Embedding feminist principles into evaluation design means thinking differently about whose knowledge counts and how evidence is generated. In Section 4, the Toolkit encourages evaluators to map intersecting vulnerabilities, develop inclusive sampling strategies, and recognise local knowledge systems as legitimate forms of evidence. This becomes especially important in crisis contexts where standard data sources may overlook women, displaced populations, or marginalised groups. Drawing on Feminist Participatory Action Research (FPAR) approaches (Section 4.3), the Toolkit promotes co-creation with affected communities — not simply as a participatory exercise, but as a way of shifting epistemic authority and recognising communities themselves as knowledge holders.
• In practice, feminist evaluation in crisis settings also requires methods that create safer and more accessible ways for people to share their experiences. Section 5 highlights participatory and arts-based approaches — including storytelling, participatory video, and community mapping — that can help amplify the voices of women, girls, and marginalised groups, particularly in contexts shaped by trauma, insecurity, or low literacy. While participatory methods are not new, the Toolkit explicitly frames them as feminist approaches to redistributing voice and agency within knowledge production. To support this, the Toolkit also includes a safe spaces for data collection checklist (Section 5.1), which goes beyond standard ethical safeguards by addressing gendered risks, unequal power relations, and barriers to participation in data collection processes.
• Feminist analysis goes beyond disaggregating data by sex or age. It asks how intersecting forms of inequality shape people’s experiences of crisis, access to assistance, and ability to influence decisions. In Section 6, the Toolkit supports evaluators in conducting intersectional analysis that examines how systemic power structures affect outcomes across different groups. Importantly, it also challenges the idea that interpretation should remain solely evaluator-driven. The community validation workshop protocol (Section 6.2) enables participants — particularly women and marginalised groups — to confirm, question, or refine findings, positioning analysis as a shared process of meaning-making rather than a purely technical exercise.
• Applying feminist ethics in crisis settings also means recognising that evaluation itself can reproduce harm if reflexivity and safeguarding are treated as secondary considerations. Section 7 therefore places strong emphasis on survivor-centred approaches, crisis-sensitive data governance, and ongoing ethical reflection throughout the evaluation lifecycle. A central feature is the focus on reflexivity as a continuous practice rather than a one-time exercise. The reflexivity checklist (Section 7.4) encourages evaluators to critically examine how their own positionality, assumptions, and institutional roles may shape interactions, findings, and power dynamics in complex crisis environments.
• Feminist dissemination is not only about communicating findings clearly; it is also about ensuring that communities who contribute to evaluations are included in how knowledge is shared and used. In Section 8, the Toolkit emphasises accessible, participatory, and action-oriented dissemination approaches that move beyond reporting primarily to donors and decision-makers. The dissemination checklist (Section 8.2) encourages evaluators to close the loop with communities, support dialogue for advocacy and mobilisation, and strengthen community ownership of findings — reinforcing the idea that participants are not merely sources of data, but active contributors to knowledge production and change.

An invitation to evaluators and practitioners 

Feminist evaluation in crisis contexts is not about doing “more” with fewer resources. It is about doing evaluation differently – with greater attentiveness to power, exclusion, and lived experience.

For evaluators working under pressure, the Feminist Evaluation in Crisis Toolkit offers a practical starting point: not a blueprint, but a set of grounded choices about what to prioritise, whose voices to amplify, and how to ensure evaluations do not inadvertently reinforce the very inequities they seek to assess.

In fragile contexts, that shift is not aspirational. It is essential.