Sharing value refers to a management strategy in the business context first introduced by Porter and Kramer (2006) proposing that creating economic value by addressing societal issues and challenges increases an organizations productivity and innovation thereby facilitating its competitive advantage on the market. Since, the number of hybrid organizations mixing social and economic value systems have grown exceptionally in the past decade. In the business environment the sharing value approach has shown itself to produce positive societal change while following a profit-seeking orientation at the same time. Against this backdrop, the question arises in how far the concept of creating shared value can be a useful approach for our struggling humanitarian sector to facilitate transformation and help to make it more effective and sustainable in its line of work. We argue that non-profit organizations need to operate more entrepreneurially and market oriented e.g. more results-driven and innovative so that organizations can deliver their services in the most cost-effective way and enable people to best possibly protect themselves and those for whom they are responsible. Hence, this paper seeks to explore to what extend the idea of creating shared value is novel in the HA context, in how far it is applicable in humanitarian relief efforts and what specific elements represent factors of success for an NGO to engage in CSV. Hereby we introduce a new causal model and adopt social entrepreneurship as a lens to explore the relationship between shared value creation and the multi-value-multi-actor-system at hand. Considering the great number of challenges, the sector is facing due to environmental, geo political, societal and demographic not only a business CSV framework but additional contextual factors and management practices are taken into account to answer these research questions. Qualitative research methods are applied and the analysis of empirical literature, case studies and the conducted interviews point to the conclusion that the CSV approach is in fact applicable to NGOs. Further, it was concluded that shared value based management and its best practices is a valuable tool for achieving CSV in the humanitarian sector and has the potential to lead to growth and more effectiveness.