Philippines Typhoon Appeal: Contribution to Change Evaluation

Typhoon Yolanda (known internationally as Haiyan), hit Eastern Samar, Leyte and Central Visayas in the Philippines on November 8, 2013, and is one of the strongest typhoons ever recorded. A total of 16 million people were affected; 6,300 died, 4.1 million were displaced, and 1.1 million houses were destroyed or damaged.

There was a huge aid response and the Disasters Emergency Committee alone raised £95m in the UK. Its 13 member agencies responded immediately 1 and have been running a multi-year recovery programme for the disaster-affected communities in the Philippines. This has involved everything from emergency lifesaving 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.