Illustrative: Every design choice shapes what an evaluation can see. In fragile spaces, those choices have to be built around the conditions that shift.
By Apricity Team
Fragility is on the rise. Armed conflict, public health crises, climate shocks, forced displacement, and other crises are pushing places and communities deeper into poverty, precarity, and danger. Humanitarian and development programs in these spaces must contend with constant change and deep uncertainty. Evaluation is affected too, because conventional approaches to assessing a program’s relevance, effectiveness, and sustainability were built for stable environments, and they strain when conditions keep shifting.
Yet these spaces are also where evaluation matters most. Resources are scarce and needs are acute, and in 2025 UN-coordinated humanitarian appeals were funded at only about a third of what they asked for, down from about half the year before. Decisions about how best to allocate that critical funding rest on evidence, and evaluation is part of that evidence, shaping whether limited support reaches people who most need it. In spaces confronting displacement, conflict, or other polycrises, the conditions that make good evaluation harder to deliver are precisely the ones where the stakes of that work are highest.
Why fragility changes evaluation
A program planned in calm can be delivered in crisis and end up looking nothing like what was originally proposed. Evaluation has to be as willing to adapt as the programs it assesses. The OECD DAC criteria ask whether a program was relevant, effective, and sustainable, and those questions still hold, but they have to be answered against conditions that shift between program design and delivery. Many standard methods assume a degree of stability that fragile settings rarely offer. For instance, conditions of uncertainty, including armed conflict and multidimensional poverty, can lead to displacement, making it difficult for evaluation to reach or trace beneficiary populations. This was the case for Apricity in both Yemen and Nepal, where our evaluations have confronted and navigated fragility in different forms.
Access is uneven and often short. In protracted conflict, evaluators may be unable to reach program sites at all, and data may have to be collected remotely or through third parties. The people an evaluation engages have often been asked for their time and accounts many times before, and frequently depend on the program being reviewed. Where people are already carrying so much, an evaluation that asks more than it needs, or asks without care, adds to the load. Sensitivity and respect show up in concrete choices, such as how long an interview runs, who is in the room, and whether the same questions are put to the same people again.
The same care extends to the people who collect the data. In-country partners and evaluators often work in the same insecure conditions as the people they interview, and their safety and well-being belong in the design from the start. None of this lowers the standard for good evaluation. It raises the demands on design, which has to be built around the conditions rather than imported from elsewhere.
Three dimensions of evaluation in fragile spaces
This series looks at three dimensions that shape evaluation in fragile settings, drawing on Apricity’s experience delivering evaluations in these contexts. Each piece asks a different question.
Who does the work? The first piece looks at partnerships and the relationships that evaluation depends on in fragile spaces. We argue for early, sincere, and equitable partnerships.
What counts as success? The second piece examines situated measurement, which means building measures around the conditions of a particular space rather than importing them wholesale from elsewhere. We argue that honest, meaningful evaluation begins from what matters where a program operates.
How does evaluation ask for what it needs? The third and final piece in this series centers dignity and the ordinary design choices that decide whether the people an evaluation involves are respected or quietly taken from.
A shared starting point
The three pieces each take up a different aspect of evaluation in conditions of fragility, but they share one argument. In fragile spaces, an evaluation’s design is never a neutral technical step. Each dimension shapes what an evaluation can see, and each matters more where conditions are hardest, and the margin for error is smallest. Together they decide whether the evidence that funders and programs rely on represents the people it claims to speak for.
Next in the series, we turn to the first question: who does the work, and why early, equitable partnerships shape everything that follows.
This series is written collaboratively by members of the Apricity team. Pieces throughout this series draw on experience gained through that work but reflect their own views and conclusions and do not necessarily represent the views of Apricity.
