Humanitarian Needs Assessment: The Good Enough Guide - Brossura

Acaps

Brossura

ISBN 10: 1853398632 ISBN 13: 9781853398636

Casa editrice: Practical Action Pub, 2014

Riassunto

What assistance do disaster-affected communities need? This book guides humanitarian field staff in answering this vital question during the early days and weeks following a disaster, when timely and competent assessment is crucial for enabling informed decision making. Needs assessment is essential for programme planning, monitoring and evaluation. In an emergency response, however, a quick and simple approach to needs assessment may be the only practical possibility – in other words, it needs to be ‘good enough’. This guide does not explain every activity needed to carry out an assessment, but it describes the assessment process, and provides a step-by-step guide through the process. It also contains a number of tools and resources that may be helpful when planning or carrying out humanitarian needs assessments. This guide is essential reading for field staff carrying out assessments after a humanitarian crisis; it should also be read by humanitarian policy makers, students, lecturers and researchers.

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Humanitarian Needs Assessment

The Good Enough Guide

By ACAPS, ECB

Practical Action Publishing Ltd

Copyright © 2014 Norwegian Refugee Council
All rights reserved.

ISBN: 978-1-85339-863-6

Contents

Acknowledgements, vii, 
Preface: Why and how to use Humanitarian Needs Assessment – The Good Enough Guide, ix, 
Chapter 1. What is needs assessment?, 1, 
Chapter 2. Steps to a good enough needs assessment, 11, 
Chapter 3. Tools, 33, 
Resources, 91, 
Key resources, 91, 
Standards and guidance, 97, 
Initiatives, 98, 
Resources and Glossary, 100, 
About ACAPS and ECB, 108, 

CHAPTER 1

WHAT IS NEEDS ASSESSMENT?

This chapter looks at what a needs assessment is, and provides you with some basic principles of assessments.

Keywords: needs assessment, decision-making, disaster, coordination, principles

What is ...?

Needs assessment

Needs assessment is how organizations identify and measure the humanitarian needs of a disaster-affected community. Simply put, needs assessment is the best way to answer the question: 'What assistance do disaster-affected communities need?'

Needs assessments use various methods to collect and analyse information. These enable the organization to make good decisions about how to allocate resources and gather more resources to meet the needs of the disaster-affected community.

Decision-making

Organizations need to make decisions as they work out how to allocate their resources to meet their goals. The main goal of humanitarian organizations is to support disaster-affected communities. Decision-making happens at every level in an organization, for various reasons.

In emergencies, needs assessments make good decision-making possible. They do this by putting information together to build up a full picture of the needs of the disaster-affected community. Needs assessments provide the evidence that helps senior decision-makers in the field (such as project managers and country directors) to make good decisions.

A disaster-affected community

In this guide, 'disaster-affected communities' and/ or 'disaster-affected individuals' refer to all members of a community that has been affected by a natural disaster or complex emergency. It includes everyone in the community regardless of age, disability, ethnicity, gender, HIV and AIDS status, religion, sexual orientation, social standing, or how much the disaster affects them.

Good enough

In this guide, being 'good enough' means choosing a simple solution rather than a complicated one. 'Good enough' does not mean second best. In an emergency response, a quick and simple approach to needs assessment may be the only practical possibility. When the situation changes, review your approach and change it to deal with the current situation.

Basic principles of needs assessment

Make the scope of the assessment reflect the size and nature of the crisis

• Do not overextend the assessment, especially in the early phases. Make it wide enough to indicate the full situation but narrow enough to be manageable.

• Consider all technical sectors: water, sanitation, hygiene (WASH), food security, health, shelter, protection, and so on.

• Consider the operating environment: environmental, social, economic, and security factors.

• Set baselines for measuring the impact of the disaster.

• When you set these baselines, note any chronic needs that existed before the disaster.

Produce timely and relevant analysis

• Do the first assessment as soon as possible after the disaster.

• Before you do the assessment, identify the specific decisions it must help with.

• Review existing data before you decide whether to collect new data.

• Check data against other sources.

• Present the minimum data needed to make the specific decisions you have identified.

• Distribute the findings and analysis quickly to support decision-making and further assessments.

Collect usable data

• Disaggregate your data to a level that will enable decision-makers to understand the different effects of the disaster on different groups.

• Disaggregate on a geographical basis, cross-check population figures against as many sources as possible, and disaggregate those figures by sex and age.

Use valid and transparent methods

• Use standardized data collection techniques and procedures for analysing data.

• Standardized procedures should lead to accurate data and sound conclusions, but always check your findings against other assessments and similar data from a variety of sources.

• Make your methodology public, including any assumptions you rely on in your analysis, limitations on the accuracy of your data, and the sources you have used. This lets others judge the quality of the data.

Be accountable

• Make sure disaster-affected communities are involved in planning, implementing, and judging the response.

• To do this you must set up processes that give communities and individuals a voice in the assessment.

Coordinate with others and share findings

• Talk with other organizations doing assessments.

• Make sure other stakeholders know that you are doing an assessment.

• Participate in coordinated needs assessments where possible – i.e. if there is a coordinated assessment that your organization is able to be part of, and if the focus of that assessment suits your organization's aims and activities.

Make sure you can get enough resources

You may need to form and train an assessment team and support them with logistics, transport, communications, accommodation, and so on. You need your organization to fully support the assessment (Tool 1).

Assess local capacities

• Consider how the local and national authorities and other groups are responding.

• Identify capacities and strategies the disaster-affected community and surrounding population are using to cope with the disaster.

• In particular, you must consider gender, age and specific vulnerabilities (such as disability). Your methods, analysis and selection of team members must take into account the different needs, vulnerabilities, capacities and perspectives of women and men, boys and girls.

Manage community expectations

• Avoid building unrealistic expectations in disaster-affected communities of what your assessment will lead to.

• Manage the expectations of other stakeholders, including local authorities and assessment partners.

• Avoid creating assessment fatigue in disaster-affected communities. Multiple visits without visible outcomes create assessment fatigue and unrealistic expectations.

• Be sensitive to cultural norms, individual privacy and the potential psychological impact of your assessment.

Remember that assessment is not just a one-off event

• Continue assessment throughout the emergency.

• Collect data in increasing detail.

• Refine the assessment and update your findings as the situation changes.

CHAPTER 2

STEPS TO A GOOD ENOUGH NEEDS ASSESSMENT

This chapter takes you through all the steps of an assessment cycle from preparedness and planning, to reporting and dissemination of findings. Each section focuses on how to efficiently carry out one step, and provides tips and links to useful tools.

Keywords: preparedness, design, implementation, analysis, reporting

Step 1: Preparing for an assessment

Before the emergency

Make sure your organization has assessment procedures that fit with its contingency plans and programme planning (Tool 2). The plan should explain how your organization will carry out the assessment from start to finish, what the different parts of the organization are responsible for, and how it will balance cost, speed and quality.

Identify, check and be ready to mobilize the staff and other resources that you will need to implement the assessment (Tool 1). A review of secondary data may only need one or two people (and can often be done by staff outside the affected area). Primary data collection will need more staff, support and funding.

Make sure you know how to get an assessment started in your organization: is there a formal process, or does it only need informal approval from a senior manager? How you mobilize resources will depend on your organization and your position in it, but you will need senior management support to secure those resources and to establish procedures in advance (for example, recruiting or seconding staff to assessment teams). You may need to persuade senior managers that it is important to be prepared for an assessment. You can do this by emphasizing that it is more cost-effective to prepare in advance.

During and after the emergency

Your organization should plan its response based on evidence that gives you a clear understanding of the situation. Needs assessment is the main way to gather that evidence. You can define your assessment using four questions:

1. Should your organization intervene, and what value will it add to the response?

2. What should the nature, scale and details of your intervention be?

3. How should you prioritize and allocate resources strategically?

4. What practical actions should the programme design and planning involve?

Before you decide what sort of assessment to do, think carefully about the following:

Step 2: Designing your assessment

There is no single methodology for an assessment that meets every information need in every situation.

You can apply the good practice described in this guide to develop simple, flexible and robust approaches adapted to your specific needs and the capacities of your organization. You should review existing tools, mechanisms and lessons learned from your own and other organizations to avoid reinventing the wheel or repeating past mistakes.

Get the basic facts

An assessment must include information about three key elements:

1. Where: locations where the impact has been greatest and/or is likely to be greatest.

2. Who: groups most in need of humanitarian assistance and/or most vulnerable.

3. What: sectors that require immediate action and/ or ongoing attention.

Engage stakeholders

You will need to engage stakeholders, especially decision-makers who will use the assessment findings and (if possible) the communities who will be involved in the assessment. Stakeholders should be clear about what the assessment is meant to achieve and produce, their role in the assessment process, and how they can use the assessment findings to help with their decisions.

Support specific decisions

Every assessment should be designed to enable the organization to make specific decisions. The following five questions will help you to provide the right information to the right people at the right time:

Be realistic

Design your assessment to fit the amount and types of resources you can mobilize. The assessment should be big enough to meet identified decision-making requirements, but the costs of collecting data should not outweigh the benefits of having it.

The more ambitious, the more costly, and less timely the assessment, the greater the chance of failure.

Review secondary data

A secondary data review should identify what information already exists. This may be information previously collected by your own organization or by other organizations (Tool 6).

Collect primary data if necessary

Once secondary data has been reviewed, if there are significant information gaps, you will need to collect primary data in the field (Tool 7).

Keep the process going

Needs assessment is not just a one-off event; it evolves as the situation changes in the weeks and months following a disaster. The focus of a needs assessment will change as the response unfolds and decision-makers require information on new issues.

Each assessment should build on previous assessments, since the information required becomes more detailed, sector specific and long term as the response develops.

Step 3: Implementing your assessment

An assessment will only be successful with effective leadership and careful management. Keep your objectives and deliverables clear, and measure your progress against them continuously.

The situation may change quickly in an emergency, so remain flexible and be ready to update the assessment to suit new circumstances. Changes may be inside your organization as new priorities are decided – for example, partnership with a government ministry. Or they may be outside your organization as new events occur – for example, a resurgence in an ongoing conflict.

You will face many challenges (see Table 1), but your assessment does not have to be perfect to be useful.

An imperfect assessment is better than no assessment, as long as its imperfections are made clear.

Use a standardized, transparent and clearly documented process; follow recognized data collection methods; use widely accepted terms from the humanitarian sector; and apply relevant technical standards and indicators. This will enable others to assess the credibility and reliability of your findings, and make it possible to compare those findings with other assessments.

Consultation and accountability

Coordinate with stakeholders (particularly national and local governments) and work with partners (such as local NGOs and community groups) to design and implement the assessment. Carrying out a stakeholder analysis may be helpful where you identify and make an overview of all the stakeholders or interest groups associated with this assessment and how they may be influenced by the outcome. This will help you determine who you should work closely with, and who you only need to keep informed.

Engage these stakeholders as early as possible, and communicate with them frequently throughout the process – for example, call them regularly to ask for technical input and guidance, email sample questionnaires, or hold consultation meetings. This engagement will help them to feel ownership of any assessment findings. However, be careful not to overload them with requests or information.

Disaster-affected communities are also stakeholders in the assessment (Tool 5). Political and community leaders will not be able to give the complete picture of how a disaster has affected the community. The assessment should try to represent all groups of the affected population, especially those who may be vulnerable.

Who is vulnerable?

Vulnerability is the result of many factors (Tool 8). Tool 9 explains how to organize a field visit, but it may be difficult to reach and consult all vulnerable individuals and communities during an initial assessment because of the factors illustrated below.

You should keep notes on which groups have been left out, list them in your report, and make plans to cover them at the earliest opportunity (Tool 8). You should also consult host communities, who may feel the impact of the arrival of communities displaced by the disaster.

The assessment team

Your assessment team is your most important resource, because the trustworthiness of the results depends on the quality of the team. The more qualified and experienced an assessment team is, the more accurate and reliable the assessment findings will be.

Choose team members who have the skills and experience you require to respond to this particular disaster (Tool 3), and make the skills and competences complement each other.

If possible, team members should be staff recruited specifically for the assessment, or existing staff who are seconded to the team. Before the emergency, recruit and train the team in the assessment skills and tools they will be using. If they have the opportunity to work together, it will make them more effective and save time during the assessment (Tool 4).

You must understand your team's strengths and weaknesses (based on characters, skills and experience) when assigning roles and tasks.

In particular your team must be willing and able to engage communities in a culturally acceptable manner. Staff may be from an ethnic or religious group that is not well perceived, or they may have prejudices about other ethnic or religious groups. You can address these problems by:

• ensuring that your team has a range of backgrounds, including ethnic and religious;

• ensuring that your team has an appropriate balance of male and female members;

• making team members aware of their prejudices, and enabling team leaders to challenge such views; and

• training team members in specific methods to engage with communities in an appropriate way.

Based on the assessment plan, you should agree on standard operating procedures (SOPs) with key stakeholders. SOPs describe the roles and responsibilities of team members, the team's management lines and support functions, and clearly identify team leaders (Tool 10). The team must understand the SOPs and be able to communicate key points to affected communities.

(Continues...)

Excerpted from Humanitarian Needs Assessment by ACAPS, ECB. Copyright © 2014 Norwegian Refugee Council. Excerpted by permission of Practical Action Publishing Ltd.
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Dettagli dell?edizione

• Editore: Practical Action Pub
• Data di pubblicazione: 2014
• ISBN 10: 1853398632
• ISBN 13: 9781853398636
• Rilegatura: Copertina flessibile
• Lingua: Inglese
• Numero di pagine: 107
• Contatto del produttore: non disponibile