Background and the Basis of this Report on “Needs and Resources Assessment”

Background and the Basis of this Report on "Needs and Resources Assessment"

This report on "Needs and Resources Assessment" followed the Terms of Reference (TOR) set by Ms. Radhika Lal in her last mission report to SDNP Bangladesh.

Mentioned in Recommendation 2 of the report, "SEMP and related partners should be queried as to their connectivity situation. This is to be achieved in the course of undertaking a Needs Assessment Survey of partners and related organizations as to their connectivity as well as their information resources (and details of the format that they’re in)" [Ms. Radhika Lal, placed this mission report in a workshop held at BIDS conference room on the 4^th of July, 1999.].

Also in Paragraph III of Business Plan and Sustainability it was illustrated, "SDNP has thus far been conceptualized as a sustainable non-profit ISP. However, while sustainability is a major concern for the implementing agency and UNDP, there is no formal feasibility study or business strategy in place for the project.", which validates the need for an assessment on Needs and Resources.

The general TOR of the assignment in Radhika Lal’s report includes, ". . . the consultant is expected to undertake a Needs and Resource Assessment of Partners so as to compile an inventory of resources that need to be put online: Survey SEMP partners and determine the extent, nature and format of their data…."

Based on these references, an extensive survey has been conducted with regard to organization’s needs and resources and data using and dissemination capability. This survey result along with face to face interviewing process helps us developing a set of recommendations, which we put at the end of this report. The methodology which let us prepare this report is as follows:

Methodology:

We developed two sets of questionnaires and these are:

Data Users and Disseminators
Needs and Resource Assessment

We tried to fix an appointment with the person in charge or the decision-makers of the Sub-implementing agencies (SIAs) so that we could go and meet them in person. The reason behind talking to them directly was to know the plans & strategies and future areas of possible cooperation with SDNP Bangladesh.
Left two sets of questionnaires to them, which we urged to fill in within a certain period of time.
Maintained a back-end database of the questionnaires filled in by different SIAs. We also used this database to make different inferences and to process the data whatever we’ve received in the field level surveying.
Our needs and resources assessment team periodically visited the offices and kept contact with the organizations in order to pick up the questionnaires in time and to take their opinion in track.
In some cases we took telephone interview and sent the questionnaires by fax, which we collected later on.
Beside these we also had informal meeting with different organizations and interviewed a number of expert people whose ideas, thoughts and experience are also reflected in our report. Also we consulted different books, journals and documents in order to prepare this report.
After we receive the data, we tried to examine the opinions found in the questionnaire forms and then summarized these to make synthesis with other observations found in other part of the questionnaire or in the interviewing process.
Once the synthesis is prepared, all the recommendations have been listed accordingly to present into the report.
While running the whole process, organizations that did not reply any particular question had not been taken into the inferences made for that question.
While examining and preparing this report it was found that some of the opinions set in the questionnaire form go contradictory in comparison to interviewing result of that particular organization. It may be because of internal communication gap. However the error has been tried to reduce by our practical observations.