Step 1: Assess your risks

The first step is doing a risk assessment. A risk assessment identifies potential crises that would disrupt your organisation’s work. Sit down with your leadership and begin listing all relevant threats and vulnerabilities that could impact your work.

• Safety issues: how could accidents in the field, but also epidemics or pandemics such as the COVID-19 virus influence your work?
• Security: how could political unrest, violence or criminal activity impact your work?
• Fiduciary: what is the risk of corruption, fraud or theft for your work?
• Legal/compliance: what would happen if you were accused of violating laws or regulations?
• Operational: what factors could hamper your organisation to achieve its objectives?
• Reputational: what could damage your organisation’s image and reputation?
• Information: what be the effects from loss of data on output, surveys or cyber insecurity (see our toolkit on Digital communication security)?

Risk areas

Each bullet point represents what we call a risk area. The following visual shows that some of these risk areas are interconnected: if once risk becomes a reality, other, interrelated, risks may more easily occur. Click on the image to enlarge it.

Source: USAID: NGO&Risks, 2019