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Analysts of humanitarian needs find themselves faced with the daunting task of analysing data, but lack clear approaches to that task. Needs assessment literature historically falls silent on providing useful guidance on how to do analysis, and instead, jumping over analysis techniques straight to discussions on how to best document and communicate findings. This technical brief seeks to redress that imbalance by breaking down the analysis process into simple steps to show that analysis consists of a fairly limited set of basic moves.

More than just a set of skills, analysis is a frame of mind, an attitude toward experience. It is a form of detective work that typically pursues something puzzling, something you seek to understand rather than something you are already sure you have the answers to. Analysis finds questions where there seemed not to be any and makes connections that might not have been evident at first. It breaks things down to search for meaningful patterns, or to uncover what we had not seen at first glance, and to understand more closely how and why the separate parts work as they do.

Understanding simple techniques used in analysis can remove some of the uncertainty and provide a clear way into the work. Each of the proposed steps outlined in this technical brief serves the primary purpose of analysis: to figure out what something means: Why it is as it is and why it does what it does.
This technical brief is based on three years of experience in analysing needs in emergency settings. It is the first of three ACAPS documents on the analysis of humanitarian needs. Readers are advised to complement this reading with the technical brief How Sure Are You? which explores how to judge the quality and strength of evidence in data analysis and the technical brief What Is the