Enhancing the Needs Assessment process at the Nigerian Red Cross

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Digital and innovation at British Red Cross

5 min readDec 4, 2023

The Nigerian Red Cross (NRCS) is continuing to implement a Disaster Management Programme, with support from the British Red Cross. As part of this programme, the GIS & IM Team at British Red Cross has been supporting to review the current needs assessment process in use by NRCS. The goal is to ensure that before a disaster:

NRCS have a standardised set of assessment questions, that are easily accessible and stored within a question library.
All stakeholders within NRCS can identify how the assessment data is going to be analysed and which questions are needed to provide data about each indicator (a measurement to describe elements of an emergency).
NRCS has an agreed workflow for creating assessment questions.

What is a Needs Assessment?

Before explaining how we looked at enhancing the needs assessment process, I thought I’d summarise what a needs assessment is.

“When Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies help people affected by disasters or crises, they start by conducting emergency needs assessments. These assessments help them understand the extent and impact of the damage a disaster or crisis has caused, as well as the ability of the affected population to meet its immediate survival needs.” (IFRC)

For NRCS, having a standard approach to needs assessments means that they can respond more effectively to the types of disasters that impact local communities, such as flood events.

What did we do to achieve these goals?

In November 2023, the Nigerian Red Cross ran a series of 3 workshops over 2 days to:

a) Review existing questions from previous needs assessments to:

Identify what these questions aimed to answer (which indicators they related to)
Who they were to be asked to
How they were going to be analysed

b) Identify which questions to keep, remove or add to a question library.

c) Define a workflow that people working in different sectors (e.g., health, WASH, disaster management, food security & livelihoods etc.) should use when creating and defining new questions.

Reviewing existing needs assessment questions

NRCS has completed many needs assessments from a number of emergencies. Needs assessment questions for these are created at the time of the emergency and analysed after. However, what if these questions could be put into a shared open document, for relevant teams to access to continually build and improve on? This is what we were aiming for.

On the first day, to set the scene for the workshops, we recapped the information analysis process of needs assessments. This included:

The purpose of needs assessments — identifying priority sectors, population groups and locations
The analysis workflow
Asking the right questions

We also reminded ourselves of the process to use to create great needs assessment questions: start with the indicator (what we want to measure) and create questions from that (for more information on this, see this blog that outlines training conducted with NRCS on information analysis in a previous phase of the programme).

Participants competed a ‘data collection plan’ and formed part of an ‘analysis plan’. They went through past questions, identifying which sector they belong to, what indicator they were going to answer, how the data was collected (such as a household interview, or key informant interview among others), the different response options to the questions if it was multiple choice and how it was to be analysed. Participants could also comment on the questions, for example, where response options differed from other needs assessments or were missing options.

As a group we got through the majority of NRCS needs assessments for recent emergencies. The next step is to review inputs from the workshop and go out to a wider group for comment.

This workshop was a good first step in increasing accessibility to assessment questions with the aim that when an emergency occurs, a question bank can be referred to with common knowledge of what is collected and how it is analysed.

Participants creating a question library — Paul Knight/British Red Cross

Defining a workflow

On the second day, we collectively designed steps that are taken after an emergency in creating, completing, and analysing needs assessments. Using this as a guide, we then had a discussion on who was responsible, accountable, consulted and informed at each of these steps using a RACI chart. After, we conducted a journey mapping exercise to identify both successes and pain points which should be addressed.

What next?

These exercises built on participants’ experiences during past emergencies. It was great to be part of workshops that use past experiences to improve current processes. For these workshops it was about increasing accessibility with the aim of continued improvement and acknowledging standard workflows. These workshops are the beginning for NRCS to develop its needs assessment question bank and identify how questions are to be analysed. This also allows for replicability and a common understanding of an output for decision makers. Likewise, the workflow to develop a needs assessment will be written up, communicated and go out for comments to relevant stakeholders.

Impact

This workshop has improved needs assessment capabilities at NRCS which will help it to respond more effectively to future emergencies. Staff and volunteers at the Nigerian Red Cross in the future will aim to have a set of questions that have been documented to identify what indicator they are going to answer, how they are asked, and ultimately how they are going to be analysed to inform a response. They will also have a process to identify who is involved in needs assessments and when. It was a great pleasure to be part of these workshops, which stemmed great discussions and requests for future iterations.

Other blogs in this series:

External links:

The Good Enough Guide to Needs Assessments (ACAPs): Humanitarian Needs Assessment — The Good Enough Guide | IM Resource Portal (im-portal.org)