Why Community Needs Assessment Should Come First

By Andrea Davidson


For the success of the projects you undertake, you should identify and understand the resources available to you and the requirements of the people you serve. Doing this helps you to establish how best to serve the targeted people. This is why community needs assessment is recommended.

When talking to the local stakeholders, you can ask about their views on the pressing requirements of the people. You can also seek to find out from them if they know where else details you want are held or whose contribution is important in better understanding the problems and solution approaches. In some cases you might be able to obtain a reasonable insight into what the people want through such consultative meetings with the local leadership and stakeholders.

Seeking to understand the challenges of a deprived people helps to draw focus on the most pressing issues. This means that such focus is likely to garner support of the local people and stakeholders which in turn means greater chances of success in the undertaking. However, in the event that you rush to implement your own mental picture without discussion with the concerned people, you may face resistance and even total rejection.

If your real intent is to advance the interest of the people by addressing their glaring plights, then you can never wish to get started on a wrong footage which could spell doom to future projects. Basically, moving in straight away to address the plight of a people without first involving them in the preliminary stages might be interpreted as contempt of their intelligence. In the end, the very people may rise against the project or sabotage it.

Even though you should have room for any differences, you should use your skills to persuade the people because in most cases, the people may be oblivious of their most pressing wants. But again, you too should be prepared to change your course if fresh ideas come up. In fact, you may decide to invest in educating the people so that you can all reach a better compromise in goals setting.

In the event that there are no prior research to help you corroborate the perspective of the local leadership and stakeholders, doing your own survey is not a bad idea. In fact, carrying out survey to establish the approval or feeling of the people regarding a particular position is less involving. You just have to be very clear on your mind about what information you want and then design the survey questionnaires in that line.

You have to balance your resources carefully to avoiding pouring too such of the available resources in consultation at the expense of the bigger challenge that the people face. While you would not wish to end up with half-baked information about what the people want done as a priority towards addressing their plight, you do not want to turn consultations into the primary consumer of the project resources. So to avoid such implications, it is recommended that you take some less expensive yet effective study approaches to establish what requires urgent attention.

You realize that universal approval on a particular project might not be possible when conducting community needs assessment. This is so because different people might have their interests in the dialogue and others might also be simply insincere with their ideological contributions. As such, it is recommended that you do not take what you obtain from such discussion sessions you as gospel truth.




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