Evaluation of Humanitarian Action: Typhoon Yolanda (Haiyan) Response

This evaluation of Humanitarian Action for the Response to Typhoon Haiyan in the Philippines, conducted in mid 2015, sought to evaluate Save the Children’s response to Yolanda, which tore through the Philippines on the morning of 8 November 2013. The team also used this as an opportunity to engage children in the evaluation itself and through this process we were able to pilot child-focused and child-led evaluation tools. The findings focus on children’s perceptions and impressions of the success of Save the Children’s response to date.

The evaluation tools – including the child-led ‘child reporters’ methodology – are included in the annex. Three qualitative methodologies were adopted to engage boys and girls from across the three field bases (Tacloban, Oromoc and Estancia). These methodologies are building on Save the Children’s growing experience in engaging children at different stages of a humanitarian response and learning from this evaluation will be used to inform future response planning, intervention and evaluation.

The evaluation highlights key learnings in terms of engaging children in humanitarian evaluations including: the importance of establishing good participatory monitoring practices to facilitate evaluation processes; building qualitative data collection capacity; building rapport and understanding the context: the challenges of attribution and recall; lack of engagement with the under five year olds and the benefits of adopting child-led methodologies