Author :
Philippe Guetier — Issue 118
11/04/2026
Pooling actions and conducting collective “systemic assessments” at key stages are two complementary levers for maximizing the benefits of aid.
This contribution aims to enrich the international debate on responses to declining humanitarian funding while encouraging humanitarian organizations and donors to begin experimenting now with freely available tools.
The reduction in international funding is weakening humanitarian organizations and threatening essential programs. Yet beyond budgets, it is the lives and living conditions of women, men, and children that are at stake.
For affected populations, the challenge is to regain safety, health, dignity, self-reliance, and future prospects. The true effectiveness of humanitarian aid is measured by the tangible improvement it brings to people’s living conditions.
Faced with dwindling financial resources, NGOs, institutions, and field actors are experimenting with ways to strengthen cooperation, pool resources, and avoid duplication. However, pooling resources alone is not enough. Seeking to pool skills and expertise as well is a valuable approach, enabling each intervention to generate greater benefits for communities.
For example, a project providing access to safe drinking water can simultaneously improve public health, school attendance, local economic activity, and environmental conditions. Bringing together organizations active in these various sectors, combining complementary expertise, and involving the affected populations makes it possible to identify these benefits, strengthen them, and reduce negative impacts.
In the humanitarian sector, the term “assessment” often refers to analyzing results after a project has been completed. Here, the process begins at the earliest stages, when several intervention options are still under consideration, and continues at key milestones throughout the project lifecycle.
The objective is not merely to assess what has already been done, but rather to collectively inform decisions about what should be done.
SDG Champions France offers, free of charge, a structured and tested operating framework built upon numerous projects across a wide range of sectors worldwide. These projects have contributed to improving existing situations without generating negative consequences in other sectors.
This operating framework is based on a form of collaboration that goes beyond merely sharing resources.
It can also be applied to humanitarian action by bringing together humanitarian organizations and experts from different sectors, as well as affected populations, from the stage where multiple intervention options are being developed.
Together, these stakeholders compare options, conduct a“systemic assessment,” and make decisions aimed at improving the proposed actions. This multi-sectoral and multi-stakeholder cooperation extends throughout the entire process, from project design to post-implementation monitoring and evaluation.
Following this structured and proven methodology and conducting collective systemic assessments at key moments in multi-sector projects can be implemented without cumbersome procedures, provided that consultation mechanisms and the depth of analysis are adapted to the project’s complexity and time constraints, particularly in emergency situations. The essential requirement is a shared commitment among stakeholders to pool activities and expertise.
In practice, this involves bringing together all stakeholders concerned by a project, jointly answering the relevant questions, carrying out a systemic assessment together, and collectively identifying improvements.
The process is collective at every stage:
Humanitarian organizations and experts from different sectors, together with affected populations whenever possible, therefore pool their analyses, systemic assessments, and decisions.
These assessments also make it possible to establish monitoring indicators derived from the positive and negative impacts identified. These indicators are used to measure actual outcomes, identify potential difficulties, and determine any necessary adjustments.
Pooling therefore continues from the beginning to the end of the intervention.
Assessing an action from a systemic perspective means identifying its positive and negative impacts not only within its primary field of intervention but also across a broad range of economic, social, and environmental domains.
For example, a project focused on food security and livelihoods may also affect public health, poverty reduction, employment, and environmental sustainability.
Conducting such assessments requires a robust global framework that encompasses the major sectors of activity and recognizes their interdependencies. In other words, it requires the ability to manage the complexity of the world.
SDG Champions France develops free web-based applications for conducting systemic assessments based on the 4allSDGs methodology, licensed by the French Water Partnership and designed by Mr. Gérard Payen.
This methodology is based on the only framework adopted by the United Nations in 2015: the 169 targets of the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs).
These targets serve as economic, social, and environmental criteria and together form a system that reflects the complexity of the world. As a result, decision-makers around the world can use these applications, organized by sector, to assess policies, strategies, programs, and projects systemically at every stage of their development.
SDG Champions France provides free access to the Apps4allSDGs.org Information Portal and, currently, two sector-specific applications available in both French and English, fully confidential and quick and easy to use:
Within a framework of shared expertise among humanitarian organizations, these applications enable stakeholders either to conduct systemic assessments jointly or to share results for collective discussion and decision-making on improvements.
The applications are highly intuitive. Users answer factual questions regarding how closely their actions relate to hundreds of situations defined by experts from five continents, where actions may affect SDG targets.
The applications then automatically process these responses, calculate impact scores for every relevant SDG target, and provide explanations for the identified impacts.
These results enable decision-makers to identify improvements that can eliminate negative impacts and maximize positive outcomes.
Results obtained by assessing the same project through several applications of this type are coherent and complementary.
New sectoral applications are expected to be launched soon in fields such as:
In fields such as health, food security, or emergency shelter, the same methodology can be implemented through collective human intelligence.
Humanitarian organizations and experts from different sectors, together with affected populations whenever possible, identify and assess potential impacts on the 17 SDGs and the most relevant targets, justify their analyses, and collectively seek improvements.
Although results are naturally less precise without digital tools, this approach allows stakeholders to conduct collectively the same type of structured analysis facilitated by the applications.
The methodology is suitable for both emergency and development contexts, with the depth of analysis adapted to the time available. It should never delay a life-saving response.
1. Bring stakeholders together
Engage actors from all relevant sectors as well as representatives of affected populations.
2. Mobilize collective human intelligence
Identify and discuss the positive and negative impacts of the proposed humanitarian action on the 17 Sustainable Development Goals and on the targets associated with negative impacts.
3. Present and justify impacts
Develop an impact diagram and a results table, similar to those generated by the web applications, identifying for each positive or negative impact the relevant SDG, target, and justification.
4. Improve the intervention design
Use the conclusions of the assessment to strengthen the planned action.
This methodology helps anticipate indirect consequences in areas that project managers may not naturally consider or may know little about.
Undetected negative impacts can create new difficulties for populations and require costly corrective measures after implementation. By identifying these risks early, the proposed approach supports better decision-making and helps prevent problems, leading to humanitarian action that is more effective, coherent, and beneficial.
It also helps reduce costs by eliminating duplication, avoiding expensive corrective interventions, and increasing the multisectoral benefits generated through collaboration.
The time commitment is relatively limited, provided users are familiar with their project and quickly become accustomed to the logic of the sectoral applications, which were specifically designed to be intuitive.
Every euro or dollar spent should contribute as much as possible to improving people’s living conditions. Donors therefore have a fundamental role to play in encouraging humanitarian actors to coordinate their actions across their different areas of intervention – water, sanitation and hygiene, shelter, food security and livelihoods, education, and so on – and to establish operational procedures that incorporate “systemic assessments” at key stages, starting from the design of interventions.
A funding proposal submitted to a donor for such interventions would benefit from including the initial options considered for these interventions and their potential systemic impacts, the assessed preliminary project, the improvements collectively agreed upon, and then a reassessment of the improved project.
The objective is to fund interventions whose potential benefits have been strengthened before implementation, without excessively increasing procedural burdens. Field monitoring after implementation remains, of course, essential to verify the actual results achieved against the indicators identified in the “systemic assessments”.
Donors could also use these sectoral applications to assess funding requests submitted by humanitarian actors themselves.
Declining funding is compelling humanitarian actors to identify innovative solutions and practices within very short timeframes in order to respond to an increasing number of people facing increasingly diverse crises worldwide.
Among these solutions, greater pooling of resources and expertise among humanitarian organizations and specialists from different sectors, involving affected populations, can lead to multi-sectoral and multi-stakeholder interventions based on a structured and proven methodology incorporating systemic assessments at key stages. This approach may provide a practical response to today’s humanitarian challenges.
Our free and highly innovative applications already make it possible to conduct such assessments in the fields of water and sanitation, as well as education and training.
This process should begin as soon as the first intervention options are being developed and continue through every key stage, including post-implementation monitoring.
The broader adoption of such an approach within the humanitarian sector, as in other major sectors, will depend in particular on donors and on their willingness to adapt their practices and equip themselves with new and effective tools.
We invite humanitarian organizations and donors to begin experimenting with this approach now, whether through the available free applications or through collective implementation in other sectors, and to share their results in order to contribute to the international debate.
Moving beyond exclusively sector-based humanitarian policies and actions • Pooling resources and expertise • Conducting collective systemic assessments • Driving operational improvements • Reassessing and refining interventions • Convincing donors • Strengthening the effectiveness of humanitarian aid in tangible ways for people in need.
Philippe Guettier.
Philippe Guettier
President of the SDG Champions France association
An engineer specializing in urban planning and civil engineering, as well as public health and the environment, Philippe Guettier has extensive experience in water-related issues and sustainable development in France and internationally.
He is currently President of the SDG Champions France association, which provides free support worldwide to decision-makers to help them contribute to the common good by integrating economic development, social progress and environmental protection in a balanced and systemic manner.
From November 2012 to July 2019, he served as Chief Executive Officer of the French Water Partnership, a public-private platform bringing together 200 French water-sector stakeholders working internationally.
Through his various roles, he has become an international expert on the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), adopted by the United Nations in 2015.
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