NEEDS ASSESSMENTS

There are a number of names for finding out information about needs. They include Community Analysis, PRA participatory Rural Appraisal; RRA – Rapid Rural Appraisal. Perhaps the most important characteristics of these methods are:
• the people whose needs you are studying participate in the process. They collect information you know you want, but also add things you never thought of. For example, in one PRA concerned with women and health, the mothers said they wanted help persuading their husbands to wait before arranging marriages for their daughters – the girls were being married off too young. This was a valid concern, linked to reproductive health, and worth following up.
• you involve colleagues of different but relevant disciplines. So if you are looking at income generation, you might want colleagues who know about agriculture, animal husbandry or fishing, or micro-industries.

The approach and many of the techniques are equally useful in urban or peri-urban (around the towns) areas as well as rural areas.


Information you might need could include:

• The numbers, age and sex distribution of the beneficiaries; their occupations and income; number, age and gender of family/dependents; housing: where they live (e.g. in remote locations, among the main population, in shanty towns or refugee camps) and whether housing adequate/inadequate; main sources of food and water.

• Total family budget and amounts going out for rent, food, water, schooling, health care. How was their condition before, were they better off, experienced natural or human made disaster. This will help to understand capacities and general mood (in trauma, depressed or hopeful) of the target groups.

• Physical problems, illnesses, risk behaviour; use of alcohol, drugs, unprotected sex.
For women: age at marriage, history of pregnancies and birth risk factors, contraceptive use.

• People and occupations: absent men? Incomers? Enough jobs? Underemployment? Access to credit for creating work? Dangerous or unhealthy occupations? Small industries? Resources used in the best way? Workloads through the year, through the day, for women/men? In rural areas: crops? Animal husbandry? Fishing? Crafts?

• Children: nutrition? Vaccinations? Spacing between babies? General care? Genital mutilation? Chances for school? Differences between boys/girls? Choices for teenagers? Age of first marriage/pregnancy? Male/female power within marriage? What does it mean to be a man/a woman?

* What are the problems for our beneficiaries? What do normal people have that they don’t have? What do they need that normal people don’t need? What do they see as most important? Where do they want the money spent? How do they see themselves – as in control of their own lives, as victims, or somewhere in between?

*** Try only to collect information you will make use of, for this project
or another in the future. When people give you information they also give you
time and confidences – and that must be respected. ***


Ensuring a Good Needs Assessment:

Good Needs Assessments are not easy, but not impossible. Get all the help you can.
Find an NGO or similar who can give you advice. Look for “Participatory Evaluation”.

You need to be able to form a team of one or two if you are working locally, or about five if you go off to do a PRA. In this case some of the team members may be advisory rather than active. The members, between them, must have the following skills:

• At least two must be able to talk easily with the beneficiaries, people oriented to make people at ease for telling, be committed to humanitarian causes, impartiality, looking for causes of problems, strong intuition, not to impose his/her stereotyped interpretations, understand their lives and at least one must be female if you are talking to women. If the beneficiaries talk different languages there must be people to translate. If you will be talking to women about personal things you need women translators.

• Someone in the team must understand figures – not a qualified statistician but someone who can work out percentages and compare one to another, who understands “more” and “less”, “seriously more” and “seriously less”.

• Someone must be able to put a questionnaire together to get the information you need – and be able to train the rest of the group to use it.

If you do a PRA in a village, then because of distances you may have to go and stay there, you will need at least five working days, so you will have to find a way of staying six nights, perhaps camping. Don’t expect the community to feed you – they are probably less well off than you. Don’t become a burden on people providing services for you that they lack themselves. Humanitarian workers sometimes expect privileged environment. If the beneficiaries live nearby, the team could free up one afternoon a week, for two months. You can find out a lot in eight half-days.


What can your team of NGO joined with beneficiaries do?

Most groups of beneficiaries, except babies, even small children, can discuss problems and needs if approached by right attitude, not pitiful, respectful and friendly. The more active groups, even those who cannot read or write, can get their neighbours talking, bring groups together, count, map, tally, do simple measurements, make timetables of activities, work out incomes and family resources, tell their own story, listen to the stories of others and spot patterns. You might be looking at the needs of children over seven or people with special needs (previously called the mentally handicapped). If you speak to them with respect, give them time, and ask them about the kind of help or care they would like to have, then they will have an opinion worth listening to.

— you can use a questionnaire.
For collecting simple facts a questionnaire is the most useful way. If you make a questionnaire, practice using it first, to make sure that is clear and takes no longer than half an hour to fill in. If you translate it, get someone else to translate it back, so that there are no mistakes. Do not have any difficult questions in your first questionnaire. Check that you would like to answer the questions yourself – if you want to ask me “Have you ever had a sexually-transmitted disease?” then you better do it with great sensitivity or I will kick you out!

EXERCISE:
How would you ask this question to whoever is sitting next to you?

— you can hold Focus Group Discussions.
You have a question: perhaps, “how are small children cared for?” Or “what are the practices here around pregnancy and child-birth?” Then the people who know – in these cases, women – are asked to come and join in the discussion. Groups of about eight people are best. Other examples of Focus Groups producing important information are: street children talking about the risks in their lives; elderly women recalling good feeding practices for small children; small-business women pooling experiences of the risks of business.


— you can do a Sickness Survey if you must (but this is difficult, so get advice).
You are studying the beneficiary group and you want to know what sicknesses they have experienced in a defined period. The information will not be very useful unless it is fairly accurate. You could give them paper and pencil and ask them to keep a list. But this only works with an educated and motivated group. You can ask them to recall their sicknesses over the last year, but most episodes will be forgotten. On the whole, recall is only successful over the previous two weeks. This is important when it comes to recording seasonal illness. If the malaria season was three months ago, malaria will be under-reported. But you can ask about sickness over the last two weeks. And you need to be very persistent and specific: “Now let’s talk about your second child – think about the day before – are you sure? – what were the symptoms? – so none of them had diarrhoea? etc”. And you can return every few months. It takes a lot of time and you might do better talking to the health workers in the area.

If you are talking to the elderly or disabled, you would probably be concerned not only about physical symptoms but about mental/emotional symptoms like depression or anger.

— you can bring in non-NGO people from different disciplines, perhaps agriculture, lawyer, economist. Then these experts, the NGO people, and community members with their different informal skills can form themselves into smaller teams. Team membership can change during the week so that everybody bounces ideas off each other. They can do the following:

• Make maps of the area and its resources, including houses, pumps, roads etc. These maps can be made on the ground using sticks and stones. Distances can be measured using pacing.

• Find out about Workloads: the daily burden of work of both men and women. (Report from one village: “the women work much longer hours than the men, mainly in the fields. The men do the same work in the fields but as it is men that do it, it is more important so more tiring”).

• Take Key measurements: for example, the nutritional status of small children under five using Upper Arm Circumference Bands. A group of women are shown how to do this then they do it in pairs. If the pair have different measurements, the expert double-checks.

Moderate malnutrition is an example of a problem that is not noticed by the community. Usually it is invisible. By measuring and discovering it, the problem becomes visible to mothers.

— you can look for the different kinds of truths, knowing that different people will tell them in various ways depending on the situation.
The village chief will paint the picture he wants officials to accept. Women’s replies to questions can be more varied and accurate than their husbands’, because they do not know the “correct“ answer. Some issues are not for public consumption. They must be brought up in private. So if you need this information, your job is to get through the layers of correct, public or political truths. You need to have done your homework. You must know the type of truths that people would not easily discuss.

EXAMPLE:
In an assessment of a project building latrines in East Africa, it was difficult to find out why some houses were not participating. Only by organising small focus group discussions, and by taking the time to talk about every missed household, did it emerge that each of these families were being badly affected by the amount the earners were spending on alcohol.




INDICATORS FOR EFFECTIVE WATER AND SANITATION PLUS HYGIENE EDUCATION

Developing aims and indicators for water projects show that a water project should have two initial aims:

• People should use the water properly, hygienically, so that there would be a good effect on the health of the family (PROPER, HYGIENIC USE); and

• People should create a structure so that the water points would continue in use (SUSTAINABILITY).

The indicators have been adapted for projects that include water, latrines and hygiene education. These targets should be agreed on or adapted with the community at the start of the project and then monitored. Many questions are geared to women because mostly they are the ones who collect water, care for small children, cook etc.


INDICATORS FOR PROPER, HYGIENIC USE
These are used both at the start of the project and during it, and if all is going well, the number of “yes” answers should increase. (Check that the indicators are measurable, relevant and achievable).

— Is soap affordable?
— Is soap purchased increasingly during the project by households?

— Is water quality maintained from the source to mouth?

Look first at the water point:
— Is the site routinely kept clean?
— Are unprotected wells or ponds chlorinated regularly (specify how)?;
— Are containers chlorinated regularly (specify how)?
— Are containers clean when they are dipped into the well or pond?
— Is the water kept clean during collection and transport?;

Then look at home hygiene in the kitchen:
— Can water be contaminated in the kitchen?;
— Are cups etc washed, dried and stored cleanly?;
— Is there soap or ash and water near the kitchen for hand-washing?
— Are hands washed before cooking?
— Are animals kept out of the kitchen?

Then look at home hygiene with small children:
— Is contaminated water boiled when children are sick?
— Can mothers make and use a rehydration drink or ORS?
— Are the faeces of children cleared up?
— Are babies well washed?
— Do mothers wash their hands after dealing with faeces?

Then look at personal hygiene:
— Are there private washing places for women?
— Is enough water used in the household for washing?
— Are washing-related illnesses getting less – skin infections, scabies?
— Do people say that they feel cleaner?

Then look at improved latrine use:
— Are there enough latrines and are they close to the houses?
— Are people free to use latrines (no taboos)?
— Are latrines clean and free from smells?
— Is there a system to wash hands after latrine use?


INDICATORS FOR SUSTAINABILITY

— ARE THERE CONFIDENT/COMPETENT VILLAGE ACTORS?

— Is there a Water & Sanitation Committee?
— Are most of the committee members the people who do the committee work?
— Is there at least one woman in the committee?
— Do women members say what they think in meetings?

— Has there been meetings with community members including the women?
— Have some of these meetings led to action?

— Do women in the community know what is going on?
— Have the women participated in activities?

— Do the women say that they can do something about diarrhoea in small children?

Do not ask general questions. Ask specifically:
"This morning, where and how did you shit, wash, etc?"
"What did you do yesterday to keep everything clean?”
"When was the last time your kid got diarrhoea? What did you do?"