Natural and man-made disasters continue to generate a negative impact on society, being a major cause of loss of human lives, environmental damage, infrastructure destruction and economic losses. It is a complex and difficult problem to be treated, that tests the ability of social organizations and individual governments to effectively address the disasters consequences, to reduce human and material losses. Thus, humanitarian aid organizations play a key role in managing relief operations aiming to reduce the humanitarian impact. In this context, this work discusses the evaluation of humanitarian operations under an optical evaluation criterion. The central objective of this doctoral thesis is to propose a systematic set of criteria to evaluate humanitarian aid organizations regarding the stages of disaster preparation and response. From an initial set of evaluation criteria obtained from the academic literature, a validation and classification process is conducted based on the perception of a group of ten experts in humanitarian operations who work in different areas. The main contributions of this work are: the identification and organization in a systematic way of evaluation criteria and the integration of academic, military, government and NGOs views in the validation and classification criteria. Twenty-three evaluation criteria are proposed as a result of the literature review and the validation process. The classification allows us to identify criteria of higher level of importance or influence in the humanitarian operations planning according to the experts view. With these results, it is expected to contribute in the review processes and continuous improvement of the performance plans of humanitarian organizations and the consolidation of a conceptual and theoretical base in a relatively new area as the main focus of academic research.