What WFP Evaluations Tell Us About Humanitarian Action, Resilience and System Transformation

At the 2026 Annual Session of the WFP Executive Board, the WFP Office of Evaluation presented different evaluation products that together offer a unique perspective on the opportunities and challenges facing humanitarian and development actors today. Spanning strategic, country-level, emergency, and synthesis evaluations, the findings highlight both areas where WFP continues to demonstrate strong performance and areas requiring renewed attention as the global operating environment grows increasingly complex.

Three Years of Evidence: Systemic findings

The 2025 Annual Evaluation Report synthesized evidence from 25 centralized evaluations completed during the year, including strategic and policy evaluations, country strategic plan evaluations, corporate emergency evaluations and synthesis work. This year's report marks the third consecutive year in which WFP has systematically analysed high-level findings emerging across its centralized evaluations. That longitudinal perspective makes it possible to distinguish between persistent organizational challenges and newer trends emerging from recent evidence.

One consistent finding since 2023 is WFP's recognised global leadership in emergency response. Across diverse contexts, evaluations continue to confirm the organization's critical role in providing life-saving assistance at scale and coordinating collective responses during crises. At the same time, evaluations continue to find that WFP's comparative advantage is less clearly understood in some development-focused areas, particularly where resilience-building and longer-term systems strengthening are concerned.

A notable new emphasis emerging from 2025 evaluations is the growing importance of enabling nationally led emergency responses. Evidence points not only to WFP's operational delivery role, but increasingly to its contributions to emergency preparedness, national capacity strengthening and support systems that allow governments to respond more effectively to future shocks. Several evaluations also highlighted the tension between ambitions for localization and the operational realities faced in highly constrained environments.

Difficult Choices in an Era of Constraints

Many findings demonstrate gradual but encouraging progress across cross-cutting areas that have long been priorities for WFP and its partners, such as protection and accountability to affected populations, gender equality and women’s empowerment, nutrition integration and environmental sustainability. Evaluations found more comprehensive approaches to protection and accountability to affected populations, broader engagement with vulnerable groups, and stronger efforts to integrate programming across sectors. Nonetheless, implementation remains uneven, and evaluations continue to identify organizational silos and gaps between policy ambitions and operational practice.

The evidence synthesized in the Annual Evaluation Report also reflects the difficult choices confronting humanitarian actors worldwide. While evaluations underscore the continued importance of WFP assistance in helping millions access food and nutrition support, they also reveal the increasing challenge of targeting and prioritization in contexts where resources are insufficient to meet growing needs. Evaluations highlighted not only technical questions about targeting, but also the ethical dilemmas associated with deciding who receives assistance when funding shortfalls require difficult trade-offs.

The evaluations also draw attention to a growing challenge facing humanitarian organizations: maintaining principled humanitarian action amid increasingly complex operating environments. Evidence highlights the difficult decisions encountered by frontline staff and points to the need for stronger institutional guidance and support to help navigate these situations while remaining focused on affected populations.

The evaluation of WFP's corporate emergency response to the Sudan regional crisis highlighted the immense operational demands associated with one of the world's largest and most complex humanitarian emergencies. The evaluation provides important lessons on how organizations can respond at scale while adapting to rapidly evolving contexts and severe access constraints.

Across resilience and livelihoods programming, evaluations reported positive results from asset creation initiatives, livelihood support and management of acute malnutrition interventions. However, evidence suggests that translating these achievements into sustained resilience and stronger value chains remains difficult, often because interventions are too short-term or insufficiently scaled.

Partnerships, Localization and Handover

Partnerships remain a cornerstone of WFP's work. Evaluations found strong collaboration with governments and United Nations partners, while also identifying opportunities to deepen engagement at subnational level and to make greater use of partnerships with international financial institutions, specialized organizations and private-sector actors. At the same time, evaluations highlighted instances where cooperating partners assumed substantial operational risks without sufficient clarity regarding risk-sharing arrangements.

The strategic evaluation of WFP's support to social protection (2019–2025) offered a complementary perspective by examining how humanitarian and development objectives can be linked through nationally owned systems. Its findings contribute to ongoing discussions on how social protection can support resilience, preparedness and sustainable pathways out of vulnerability.

Meanwhile, the evaluation synthesis on WFP's engagement in United Nations humanitarian coordination examined how coordination mechanisms influence collective humanitarian outcomes. The synthesis highlighted the importance of strong partnerships, clearly defined roles and effective collaboration across the humanitarian system—issues that also emerged repeatedly across the Annual Evaluation Report findings.

Another emerging theme across the 2025 evidence base is programme handover and transition. While many evaluations observed efforts to promote sustainability and national ownership, they consistently emphasized the need for stronger transition strategies, more realistic planning assumptions, and better use of data to assess cost-efficiency and readiness for handover. These findings point to a broader shift in evaluation attention towards questions of long-term institutional sustainability and exit planning.

Complementary Insights from WFP Evaluations

Taken together, these evaluations underscore a common message: effectiveness increasingly depends not only on delivering assistance, but also on strengthening national capacities, enabling locally led responses, fostering meaningful partnerships and planning for sustainable transitions. Across humanitarian action, social protection and coordination, evaluation evidence points toward the same challenge—how to achieve immediate results while simultaneously building the foundations for longer-term resilience and nationally driven development.

If you are curious about learning more about the latest WFP evaluation you can visit them through the links below:

Authors

João Lima, M&E Officer (WFP)
Julia Betts, Deputy Director of Evaluation (WFP)

What WFP Evaluations Tell Us About Humanitarian Action, Resilience and System Transformation

Posted on 02/09/2026 by João Lima