Evaluating Humanitarian Protection: A Protection-Specific Evaluation Quality Assessment Framework

In 2021, over 80 million people are forcibly displaced from their homes. 177 million people need US$ 28.8 billion worth of humanitarian assistance to meet their basic needs. The international humanitarian system (IHS) exists to respond to this massive need when states or other duty-bearers are unable and/or unwilling. The gargantuan task of responding to human suffering on a global scale is one that the IHS struggles valiantly to conduct, even though the demand for aid outweighs its supply. Donor fatigue, increased needs, and the COVID-19 pandemic have created a mismatch between the availability of resources and the funding requirements of the IHS. This scarcity has forced the IHS to investigate how funds can be allocated most efficiently to make the greatest impact. Thus, the IHS is undergoing a movement of accountability reforms involving staff professionalization and the use of evidence-based practice. An important aspect of this movement is the application of evaluation to make informed judgements about the value of interventions and their impact, as well as how to improve them. Evaluation of humanitarian programming contributes to a body of evidence that establishes “what works” and what does not. This research reviews current humanitarian protection literature to investigate what criteria should be used when assessing the quality of protection-specific evaluations and then applies a novel protection-specific evaluation quality assessment framework to ten evaluation reports, finding that only five out of ten selected reports had satisfactory quality based on Global Evaluation Report System (GEROS) scoring metrics. As a result, decision makers may not know what works and what does not in humanitarian protection and should be cautious when using evaluation findings