National Consultant for the Evaluation of UN Women’s Humanitarian Response in Ukraine (2022-2026), Home-Based, SSA

Background:

UN Women, grounded in the vision of equality enshrined in the Charter of the United Nations, works for the elimination of discrimination against women and girls; the empowerment of women; and the achievement of equality between women and men as partners and beneficiaries of development, human rights, humanitarian action and peace and security.

The full-scale invasion of Ukraine by the Russian Federation in February 2022 triggered the largest and fastest-growing displacement crisis in Europe since the Second World War. Within months, millions had fled their homes — westward within Ukraine and across borders into neighboring countries — with women and children constituting around 90 per cent of the initial refugee outflow, as martial law restricted the departure of men of conscription age.[1] What began as a mass emergency has since evolved into a protracted war: hostilities have concentrated along the eastern and southern frontlines, while relentless, systematic attacks on civilians and civilian infrastructure — including energy, transport, health and education facilities[2] — have extended the war's impact across the entire country, with 2025 marking the deadliest year for Ukraine's women since the full-scale invasion began.[3] In 2026, over 10.8 million people in Ukraine are estimated to require humanitarian assistance, 60 per cent of them women and girls.[4] (See more in Annex 1: Country Context.)

In Ukraine , UN Women works to ensure that the humanitarian response to the full-scale war addresses the distinct needs, priorities and rights of women and girls. It also supports women and girls to participate and lead in crisis response and recovery. Drawing on its triple mandate — normative, coordination and operational — UN Women’s Ukraine Country Office supports the humanitarian architecture in Ukraine to deliver on its gender equality commitments. It provides protection, livelihood and leadership support to war-affected women and girls, working in close partnership with Ukrainian women's rights and women-led organisations at the forefront of the response. This engagement spans the humanitarian–development–peace nexus, guided by its corporate Humanitarian Strategy[5] and Core Commitments in Humanitarian Action[6].

UN Women's Independent Evaluation Service (IES) is undertaking a thematic evaluation of UN Women's humanitarian response to the full-scale war in Ukraine (2022–2026). The evaluation will provide the organisation with an understanding of how it has responded and continuously adapted its humanitarian work — in Ukraine — since the onset of the full-scale invasion. The primary focus of the evaluation will be UN Women’s work in Ukraine, while acknowledging UN Women’s work in the Europe and Central Asia (ECA) region, including Moldova, Georgia and a regional refugee response led by the Regional Office. The purpose of the evaluation is to provide information for decision-making, learning and accountability. Its findings will inform UN Women's strategic positioning and value-add in the humanitarian landscape, strengthening its capacity to respond effectively to the needs and priorities of women and girls affected by the war.

UN WOMEN’S HUMANITARIAN RESPONSE TO THE FULL-SCALE WAR IN UKRAINE

Between 2022 and 2026, UN Women's humanitarian response in Ukraine has been led by the UN Women Ukraine Country Office and has evolved in scope and priorities. The Women Peace and Humanitarian Fund has provided significant financial resources to UN Women’s humanitarian engagement in Ukraine and has been one of the primary mechanisms of UN Women’s humanitarian support in the country.

Key Components of UN Women’s Humanitarian Response in Ukraine[1]:

Inter-agency coordination on gender in humanitarian action: Through its coordination and normative mandate, UN Women worked to ensure that the humanitarian system as a whole delivered on its gender equality commitments — providing the gender expertise, data and technical support that enabled humanitarian actors to identify and respond to the distinct needs of women and girls. Key actions included:

• Leading gender and humanitarian coordination interagency structures across various levels of the response. This included establishing and co-chairing: the national Gender in Humanitarian Action (GiHA) Working Group in Ukraine and sub-national GiHA Working Groups in Poltava and Zaporizhzhia.
• Generating gender data, analysis and evidence to inform the response, including Rapid Gender Analyses (RGAs), gender analysis within the annual Multi-Sector Needs Assessments (MSNA) for the wider refugee response and Ukraine response, Rapid Damage and Needs Assessments (RDNA) and contributions to the Humanitarian Needs and Response Plan (HNRP) and the Inter Agency Standing Committee (IASC) Gender Accountability Framework Report.
• Providing technical review and input to key humanitarian monitoring, planning and implementation processes such as related to the MSNAs, HNRPs, funding proposals under Ukraine Humanitarian Fund standard allocations, and monitoring the response through the application of the Gender with Age Marker (GAM) across cluster response plans.
• Capacity building for Civil Society Organisations (CSOs), government counterparts, International Non-Governmental Organisations (INGOs) and UN partners on gender-responsive humanitarian action, including on GAM, data collection, gender analysis, integrating gender into the humanitarian programme cycle, and Leave No One Behind (LNOB).

Protection and livelihood support to war-affected women and girls: Through its operational mandate, UN Women delivered gender-responsive, multi-sectoral assistance that combined protection, livelihoods and leadership support, largely through partnerships with women's rights and women-led organisations. Key actions included:

• Channelling flexible funding through the Women's Peace and Humanitarian Fund (WPHF) to Ukrainian women's organisations delivering lifesaving assistance, including food and non-food items, evacuation from frontline communities, emergency livelihoods, mental health and psychosocial support, and protection services. This has included channelling approximately USD 18.2 million to support 53 women’s organisations. In 2025 alone, almost 60,000 direct beneficiaries were reached through WPHF-funded initiatives.
• Delivering multi-sectoral emergency responses in escalating crises, including assistance to 2,195 women and girls in the Sumy region (2025), and an integrated humanitarian and recovery programme in three collective sites in the Kharkiv region, combining gender-responsive protection services, people-centred site management and durable solutions.
• Reprogramming its pre- full-scale war portfolio from February 2022 onwards, with the support of the Governments of Canada, Sweden, Denmark and Norway and the EU, to meet emerging humanitarian needs, and implementing dedicated humanitarian projects, such as the Women Empowerment centres/ Safe Spaces for women and girls in Zaporizhzhia and Ivano-Frankivsk in 2022.
• Income generation activities and protection services in safe spaces to internally displaced women through a Japan-funded programme (2023–2024) including a regional component. Humanitarian assistance and core support funded through UN Women's National Committees Ukraine Appeal, supporting both women and girls affected by the war in Ukraine and Ukrainian refugees in neighboring countries.

Amplifying voices, agency and leadership: UN Women placed war-affected women and their organisations at the centre of the response. Through the WPHF — the largest feminist fund for gender-responsive humanitarian assistance and early recovery in Ukraine — UN Women provided direct, flexible funding to 53 women's rights and women-led organisations as front-line responders. This support strengthened their capacity to exercise voice, agency and leadership in the response and recovery at national, regional and local levels, and embedded women's perspectives in Ukraine's key humanitarian response documents and frameworks. The GiHA working group at the national and sub-national levels also worked to advocate for the needs of women and girls in the humanitarian response with data, evidence, and knowledge of best practices.

Across the ECA region, UN Women has also supported the large wave of Ukrainian refugees. This has included, for example:

• Leading gender and humanitarian coordination interagency, including the Ukraine Situation Regional Response Gender Task Force under the Regional Coordination Forum and the Gender Task Force under Moldova's Refugee Coordination Forum.
• Regional project Slovakia, Poland and Georgia funded by Japan: Strengthen the resilience of women and girls’ refugees from Ukraine and increase gender security in hosting countries (2024-2025)
• Delivering protection, gender-based violence (GBV) response, basic needs and livelihoods support to Ukrainian refugee women and girls and host communities in Moldova, through local women's organisations, including through the WPHF.
• Supporting Ukrainian refugee women in Georgia through skills training, mental health support, language classes, and employment opportunities.

UN Women's humanitarian response in Ukraine has been anchored in the national and international frameworks governing humanitarian action in Ukraine, and in UN Women's corporate frameworks. At country level, the response aligned with the HNRPs and adhered to the policies and commitments of the IASC, including the IASC Gender Policy. Within UN Women, the response was guided by the UN Women Strategic Plan and the Ukraine Country Office Strategic Note. In UN Women all humanitarian work should also be guided by the corporate Humanitarian Strategy, the Core Commitments in Humanitarian Action and the Leadership, Empowerment, Access and Protection (LEAP) Gender Equality Accelerator/Programming Framework. A Humanitarian Strategy for Ukraine was developed in 2025 based on these, which is supposed to guide the strategic direction of the Ukraine CO.

An important note is that as UN Women operates in a nexus environment it’s humanitarian work in Ukraine is closely interconnected to all areas of work, as outlined in their Strategic Note, including Women’s Economic Empowerment (WEE); Women, Peace and Security (WPS); Governance, Participation and Leadership; and cross-cutting communications support to share work on gender norms and stereotypes. Delineating what falls within the scope of humanitarian action is not always straightforward in Ukraine’s nexus context, where humanitarian, recovery, peacebuilding and development efforts are deeply interconnected due to the complex nature of the war and how it impacts all facets of society and the lived experiences of women and girls. The inception phase of the evaluation will further unpack and define what is considered to fall under the humanitarian response and map connections to other thematic areas of work.

During 2022–2026, UN Women's response to the full-scale war in Ukraine was supported by a range of funding partners across the humanitarian–development–peace nexus. Dedicated humanitarian funding was received from WPHF, Austria, Japan and UN Women National Committees. Other partners funded complementary programming, including Canada, France, and Sweden, Norway and Denmark, alongside contributions from the EU and the US Bureau of Population, Refugees, and Migration. Notably, the Country Office had limited access to traditional humanitarian financing instruments — such as CERF, ECHO, the Ukraine Humanitarian Fund and funding channelled through the HNRP — a constraint that shaped the design and delivery of the response and is relevant context for this evaluation.

PURPOSE, OBJECTIVES, SCOPE AND USE

Purpose and Objectives

The UN Women IES evaluates the work of UN Women to enhance organisational accountability, provide evidence-based information for decision-making and contribute to learning on gender equality and the empowerment of women. The evaluation serves a dual purpose. Looking back, it will assess the results of UN Women's humanitarian response to the full-scale war in Ukraine (summative); looking forward, it will generate insights to inform the future direction and positioning of UN Women's humanitarian engagement in Ukraine(formative). To this end, the evaluation has the following objectives:

1. Assess the relevance and coherence of UN Women's humanitarian response — internally, across its areas of work and triple mandate, and externally, vis-à-vis the UN system and the humanitarian coordination architecture — and UN Women's added value from the perspective of rights holders and duty bearers.
2. Assess effectiveness and organisational efficiency in progressing towards gender equality and the empowerment of women through the humanitarian response, including intended and unintended results, the synergies realised across the triple mandate, and between UN Women and the WPHF. This includes assessing the extent to which UN Women's corporate systems, policies and procedures — including fast-track measures — were fit for purpose in enabling a timely and effective humanitarian response.
3. Assess how UN Women adapted its humanitarian response to the evolving needs of women and girls and to the changing war context, and in line with the availability of financial resources
4. Analyse how a human rights approach, gender equality and disability inclusion principles, humanitarian principles and UN Women's Core Commitments in Humanitarian Action are integrated in the design and implementation of its work.
5. Produce lessons learned from UN Women's humanitarian engagement in Ukraine and the region, including its strategic positioning, added value, partnerships, communications, coordination role and programmatic approaches, and identify good practices, challenges and areas for improvement, providing recommendations to inform the future direction of UN Women's humanitarian and nexus engagement.

Scope of the Evaluation

The scope of the evaluation is defined across three dimensions: thematic, geographic and timeframe. Reflecting the evolving and cross-cutting nature of UN Women's humanitarian engagement — much of which was implemented across different areas of work rather than under a single humanitarian programme — the scope is deliberately defined broadly at this stage. It will be further refined during the inception phase, based on the desk review, evaluability assessment and scoping consultations, and the final delimitation of the evaluand will be set out in the inception report.

Thematic scope: The evaluation covers UN Women's humanitarian response to the full-scale war in Ukraine since 2022, including both interventions explicitly identified as humanitarian and humanitarian-relevant work under other areas of programming; the precise evaluand will be delimited during the inception phase. The scope is anchored in UN humanitarian and UN Women's corporate humanitarian frameworks — the Humanitarian Strategy (2022–2025), the LEAP Gender Equality Accelerator and the Core Commitments in Humanitarian Action (2025) — and structured around the Core Commitments' two pillars and cross-cutting approach:

• Inter-agency coordination on gender in humanitarian action;
• Protection and livelihood support to war-affected women and girls;
• Amplifying voices, agency and leadership, and accelerating localisation.

Geographic scope: The evaluation will primarily focus on UN Women’s work in Ukraine, including all areas where UN Women has implemented humanitarian work since 2022, coordinated from the Kyiv office and the Dnipro sub-office. The evaluation will also acknowledge UN Women’s work in the ECA region, including Moldova, Georgia, and a regional refugee response led by the Regional Office. Data collection locations within Ukraine will be determined during the inception phase through purposive sampling, taking account of safety and security considerations.

Timeframe: The evaluation covers the period from February 2022, the onset of the full-scale invasion, to September-2026. Humanitarian-relevant work preceding February 2022 falls outside the scope, although the evaluation will take account of the pre-2022 context, including UN Women's presence in Ukraine since 2016 and the humanitarian situation in eastern Ukraine since 2014, in so far as it informs the analysis.

Users

The primary and secondary users and intended use are outlined below.

Primary & Secondary Intended Users	Primary Intended Use
Learning & Knowledge Generation	Strategic Decision-Making	Accountability	Capacity Development & Mobilisation
UN Women CO Personnel	X	X	X	X
UN Women ECA personnel	X	X	X
UN Women HQ Senior Management	X	X	X
UN Women IEAS	X		X
UN Coordination Partners	X		X
Primary Target groups	X		X	X
Civil Society Representatives	X		X	X
Donors & Multilateral Partners	X	X	X

EVALUATION CRITERIA AND KEY QUESTIONS

The evaluation will apply the five OECD/DAC evaluation criteria (relevance, coherence, effectiveness, efficiency, and sustainability), as well as UN Women's additional criterion on human rights, gender equality, disability inclusion, and humanitarian principles, which will be assessed on a cross-cutting basis.

The evaluation team will revise the evaluation questions based on consultations during the inception phase and considering the feasibility of objectives and scope outlined in this Terms of Reference. The evaluation team should raise and address any other relevant issues that may emerge during the evaluation. They should be guided but not limited by the evaluation questions listed below. The evaluation team will develop an evaluation matrix during the inception phase in consultation with the Internal Reference Group (IRG) and the Evaluation Reference Group (ERG) which will outline the questions and means of answering them.

1. Relevance: To what extent has UN Women's humanitarian response addressed the evolving needs and priorities of women and girls affected by the full-scale war in Ukraine, in line with national and international frameworks?
2. Coherence: How coherent has UN Women's humanitarian engagement been, internally across UN Women's areas of work and triple mandate, and externally within the humanitarian coordination architecture in Ukraine and the region?
3. Effectiveness: To what extent has UN Women's humanitarian response contributed to results for war-affected women and girls, and what factors enabled or constrained achievement?
4. Efficiency: To what extent were UN Women's organisational structures, resources and systems fit for purpose to deliver a timely, quality humanitarian response?
5. Sustainability: To what extent are the results and strategic gains of UN Women's humanitarian response likely to be sustained, including through strengthened national and local capacities and linkages to recovery and development?
6. Human rights, gender equality, disability inclusion and humanitarian principles: To what extent were human rights, gender equality, disability inclusion and humanitarian principles integrated into the design and implementation of UN Women's humanitarian response in Ukraine?