Humanitarian Needs Assessment Specialist

We are recruiting to fill the position below:

Job Title: Humanitarian Needs Assessment Specialist

Location: Nigeria
Job Type: Full-time

Job Summary

• In this highly dynamic role, you will support Country Offices to design and implement high-quality, principled humanitarian needs assessments in real time—ensuring Plan International is well positioned to design effective programmes, secure funding and respond to the needs of the most at-risk children, especially girls.
• We are seeking an experienced Humanitarian Needs Assessment Specialist to strengthen the quality, consistency and impact of needs assessments across our humanitarian portfolio.
• This role involves significant global travel and deployments to humanitarian crises, often at short notice.

Key Responsibilities
You will:

• Design and deliver needs assessment training to build organisational capacity.
• Strengthen alignment with donor requirements, including ECHO submissions during HIP cycles.
• Produce an annual global overview of assessments and emerging humanitarian trends.
• Develop and maintain user-friendly tools, guidance and methodologies for rapid and multi-sectoral needs assessments.
• Support Country Offices to deliver high-quality assessment reports suitable for donors, clusters and peer agencies.
• Ensure gender, child protection, disability inclusion and age considerations are central to all assessments, in line with Sphere and Core Humanitarian Standard requirements.
• Represent Plan International in inter-agency coordination forums, including IASC-related networks.
• Deploy to Country Offices (up to 4 months at a time) to directly support assessment design and implementation.
• Support fundraising, advocacy and influencing teams by translating assessment data into compelling insights and products.
• Work closely with MERL and Digital teams to promote the use of digital data collection tools and alignment with monitoring and evaluation systems.
• Ensure safeguarding, child protection, and gender equality policies are fully embedded in all areas of work.

About You

• You bring both technical expertise and a collaborative, capacity-building mindset.
• You are an experienced humanitarian professional who thrives in complex and fast-moving environments.

Essential experience and skills:

• Experience using digital tools for data collection and analysis.
• Experience developing and delivering training.
• Extensive experience leading or supporting humanitarian needs assessments across diverse emergency contexts, including rapid-onset crises.
• Strong analytical, coordination and report-writing skills.
• Familiarity with donor expectations and humanitarian standards (Sphere, CHS, CPMS, INEE).
• Ability and willingness to deploy at short notice and work in challenging environments.
• Strong expertise in gender analysis and integrating protection and inclusion into assessments.

Desirable:

• Experience contributing to funding proposals or donor submissions.
• Fluency in English; French, Spanish or Arabic is an asset.
• Experience developing advocacy or influencing messaging from assessment findings.
• Experience working with partner organisations.

Working Conditions:
This is a global, deployment-heavy role. You will spend approximately:

• 50% of your time in-country during the first year
• Up to 75% in subsequent years.