Philippines Typhoon Appeal: Contribution to Change Evaluation

In response to Typhoon Haiyan/Yolanda, which hit the Philippines in November 2013, the 13 member agencies of the Disasters Emergency Committee (DEC) set up a multi-year recovery programme for the disaster-affected communities. This has involved activities from emergency life-saving aid in the aftermath of the storm to longer-term recovery work based largely on restoring housing and livelihoods for the affected communities.

As part of the DEC’s evaluation of the disaster response, it has piloted a new evaluation method called “Contribution to Change”. Developed by Oxfam and the University of East Anglia, this is the first time the Contribution to Change (CtC) method has been used to assess a disaster response across a network of organisations.

Rather than singling out any one DEC member agency, or looking to see whether an agency’s planned outcomes were met, it instead establishes the overall collective contribution of humanitarian aid to the recovery of the affected population. CtC aims to give the DEC agencies an in-depth and unbiased report on how their work helped selected Filipino communities recover in the first year after the disaster of Typhoon Haiyan.