Humanitarian Needs Assessment: The Good Enough Guide

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.

ACAPS support and strengthen humanitarian capacities to carry out better coordinated assessments before, during and after crises. Through development and provision of innovative tools, know-how, training and deployment of assessment specialists, the project aims to contribute towards a change in the humanitarian system's current practice with respect to needs assessments.