Overview

HAD recognises the necessity of taking a bottom-up approach when identifying the needs of local humanitarian actors. This not only ensures accuracy in needs identification, but gives local organisations a central role in the design and planning of their capacity building activities, enabling those activities to be fully tailored to organisations’ needs, job roles, and levels of knowledge. HAD uses various tools for conducting needs assessments, most notably training needs assessments (TNA), development needs assessments (DNA), and organisational capacity assessments (OCA), depending on our clients’ needs, the local context, and the objectives of the assignment.

Main objectives

  • Organisational Capacity Assessment Tool (OCAT) – The objective of the OCAT is to score the institutional abilities, systems, procedures, and policies of an organisation against sector-relevant benchmarks in 7 capacity areas. This offers a quantitative and comprehensive way of recording organisational strengths and weaknesses. It can as such be used as a standalone needs assessment or conducted before and after a capacity strengthening intervention to measure the intervention’s impact on the organisation.

  • Development Needs Assessment (DNA) – The objective of the DNA is to identify an organisation’s specific areas for development to recommend relevant training and capacity building interventions to address those areas. The DNA is a more flexible and qualitative process that can be adapted to the objectives of an assignment, the local context, and the preferences of an organisation.

  • Training Needs Assessment (TNA) – The objective of the TNA is similar to the DNA, but is aimed only at identifying training needs – often targeted at individuals or departments – rather than providing a comprehensive organisational development review.

What it includes

Tool identification and tailoring

Identifying the most appropriate needs assessment tool and tailoring it to the objectives of the assignment, the local context, and the organisation being assessed to ensure the most relevant data is captured.

Data collection, analysis, and verification

Collecting data through self-assessment surveys, focus group discussions (FGDs), and interviews with key staff members (KIIs). This is followed by analysis and verification of the data through cross-referencing and triangulation.

Reporting

Preparing of a brief summary report to present the key findings of the needs assessment.

Who is this service for?