In October 2014 the IASC Steering Group for IAHE considered necessary, given the specific context and nature of the crisis, to assess its evaluability and understood that a scoping and planning exercise of the IAHE was a precondition for launching an evaluation in CAR. In January 2015, the Humanitarian Coordinator in CAR emphasised the need to undertake the IAHE and suggested that a scoping mission take place in February 2015, in order for the CAR IAHE to be carried out during the first half of 2015.

Context and Aims of the Exercise

The Inter-Agency Humanitarian Evaluation is triggered to support the humanitarian response following the December 2013 formal activation of an IASC system-wide level 3 emergency response to the Central African Republic, which had been extended until June 2015. An IAHE is mandatory for all declared L3 system-wide emergencies and is an independent assessment of the results of the collective humanitarian response. It evaluates the extent to which planned collective results have been achieved and how humanitarian reform efforts have been included and have contributed to that achievement. IAHEs are not in-depth evaluations of any specific sector or of the performance of a specific agency.

The overall purpose of this exercise was to define the thematic, temporal and geographic scope of the IAHE in CAR to understand the extent to which it would be possible to assess results given the availability of data and information, and respond to the information needs of the key actors, including affected people, on coordinated humanitarian response. It also further defined the focus and scope of the evaluation considering its purpose and the future utilisation of primary stakeholders, while providing an increased knowledge and understanding of the challenges while identifying potential solutions and useful methodologies to enable a more feasible, credible and robust evaluation. The scoping study was set out to determine the geographic limits of the IAHE (whether it should focus purely on the in-country response in the CAR for example). The exercise took into consideration the evaluation planning pre-requisites and proposed questions and issues to be covered without predefining the IAHE’s design, which will be part of the inception stage of the evaluation itself.