Evaluation criteria and the CHS

Where a humanitarian actor is committed to the CHS, this may be an important reference point when evaluating its humanitarian action. This section provides guidance on how the CHS can be integrated with the evaluation criteria.

The CHS has nine commitments (see Box A1: The nine CHS commitments) each underpinned with practical ‘requirements’. The overall aim is to ensure that organisations support people and communities affected by crisis and vulnerability in ways that respect their rights and dignity and promote their primary role in finding solutions to the crises they face. The CHS is founded on the humanitarian principles and it builds on the Sphere Humanitarian Charter (Sphere Project, 2018).

The CHS can be applied to any humanitarian actor.^[1] Some actors prefer the CHS compared to more conceptual evaluation criteria, due to the clarity of the CHS commitments (e.g. stated as sentences), its operational orientation, and therefore its accessibility to programme staff. The CHS has proven particularly popular among some INGOs for real-time learning and evaluation (Buchanan-Smith and Morrison-Metois, 2021).

How does the CHS relate to the ALNAP evaluation criteria?

As with the humanitarian principles, some CHS commitments clearly relate to specific evaluation criteria. For example, commitment 6 on coordination and complementarity fits with coherence. However, most CHS commitments straddle more than one criterion, as shown in Table A 4. How evaluation questions on the CHS commitments relate to the criteria will depend partly on the particular issue to be explored. And this may be at the discretion of the evaluation manager who drafts the TOR.