The whole is greater than the sum of its parts: WFP and OCHA join forces on humanitarian evidence
By Jonas L. Heirman, Daniel Pfister, Hanna Paulose and Jennifer Waidler
2025 was declared the worst humanitarian year on record. Famines in Gaza and Sudan. Record aid worker casualties. A 45 per cent funding collapse.
It’s early days, but 2026 does not promise to be any better.
The UN cannot respond to these crises just by doing the same things more carefully. It requires fundamental shifts in how agencies work together — and how they prove that their work is making a difference.
This is why the World Food Programme (WFP) and OCHA have formalized a partnership on impact evaluations in December 2025.
Anchored in both agencies’ mandates — WFP’s frontline role in fighting hunger and OCHA’s coordination of global humanitarian response, coupled with WFP’s internal impact evaluation capacity — the partnership focuses on one concrete ambition: generating rigorous, joint impact evaluation evidence on humanitarian action, with a specific focus on anticipatory action.
The ongoing UN80 reform process is asking hard questions about whether the UN is fit for purpose in this new reality. At its core, UN80 is a call to break down institutional silos, demonstrate value for money and rebuild trust with member states and donors.
This partnership is a direct response to that call and addresses the question every donor, partner and affected community is now asking: is the UN making the most of every dollar?
The answer starts with being honest about what isn’t working. Right now, agencies are duplicating evaluations, missing the full picture of multi-agency responses and paying the price of fragmented data.
The partnership between OCHA and WFP intends to address this in three tangible ways.
#1. Save costs on evidence generation
When WFP launched its first Impact Evaluation Strategy back in 2019 , the world looked different. Evaluations were relatively affordable and programmes had more stable funding. The pressure to prove that every dollar added impact existed, but it was manageable.
That world no longer exists.
Today, the UN is being asked to do more with dramatically less, making duplication a luxury the system can no longer afford. When UN agencies evaluate similar programmes without aligning on evidence priorities or methodologies, the result is wasted resources, fragmented findings and communities surveyed repeatedly by different actors asking similar questions.
In Bangladesh and Nepal, WFP ran two parallel randomized controlled trials on anticipatory cash assistance. The evaluation and programme teams coordinated with OCHA from the start, using aligned methodologies and shared financing through the Central Emergency Respond Fund (CERF).
The result was comparable, credible evidence across two countries that directly informed both agencies’ decision-making. This is the model the partnership will build on.
#2. Allow agencies to see the full picture
A single agency evaluating its own intervention — say, anticipatory cash transfers — often can’t see what else is happening to the same households: livelihood support from another agency, protection services, in-kind assistance.
This blind spot produces incomplete evidence, and incomplete evidence leads to incomplete decisions.
A joint WFP-UNICEF evaluation in South Sudan surfaced these gaps: while livelihood interventions improved food security and agricultural outcomes, access to nutrition services remained low the further away families lived from health and nutrition facilities.
At the same time, school enrolment increased alongside student-to-teachers ratios, an insight that only emerged by capturing a wider range of support across both agencies and prompted a meaningful shift in programming.
That course correction would have been much harder to make from a single-agency vantage point. By coordinating from the programme planning stage, particularly for OCHA-facilitated multi-sector programmes like anticipatory action, we can design impact evaluations that reflect the full scope of the humanitarian response, not just one agency’s slice of it.
#3. Decrease data silos
When UN agencies work in the same locations but do not share data, they often independently invest in identifying, targeting and verifying the same households, duplicating costs that could be redirected to direct assistance.
This partnership may not solve the data sharing challenge overnight, but it will put in place the right conditions and processes to make it the norm rather than the exception.
Bangladesh shows what becomes possible when agencies commit to breaking data siloes. Building on learning from WFP and OCHA’s collaboration on the OCHA-facilitated anticipatory action framework, agencies are now preparing to use a common beneficiary database to coordinate targeting and deliver a joint assistance package to the same households this monsoon season.
The partnership will design and scale such approaches.
#What comes next?
The agreement runs until 2030, with the first two years as a pilot phase.
In 2026, WFP and OCHA will align on priority evidence areas and contexts, begin feasibility discussions with national partners and invest in shared learning through convenings and communication products.
In 2027, impact evaluations move into implementation with a joint year-end review to assess the pilot and shape the partnership’s next phase.
When resources shrink and needs grow, working without coordination is a cost the humanitarian system can no longer justify. The world has revolved many times since Aristotle put forth the statement that gives this blog its title, yet it remains as relevant today as ever: the whole truly is greater than the sum of its parts, but only if we choose to build it together.