SWOT Analysis

A SWOT Analysis* is a way to assess an organization or a programme’s STRENGTHS, WEAKNESSES, OPPORTUNITIES, and THREATS by looking at internal and external factors that may have an impact.

A SWOT analysis allows you to step back from day-to-day involvement and to identify factors that may be affecting your organization or programme plan. It will help you to think through capacity and resource issues.

Bringing a group together to perform a SWOT analysis is an easy way to engage with stakeholders – for instance, partners, staff or intended beneficiaries – and give them a sense of ownership and commitment to the success of the initiative.

For an example of a SWOT Analysis, click here.

Why use a SWOT Analysis?
The SWOT analysis is useful to:

• realistically examine the positive and negative effects of the programme environment to determine if your plans are feasible,
• to help identify useful partnership or funding opportunities,
• to agree on who the right parties are to develop or carry out particular activities.

For instance:
1) If an organization has determined that it has little experience or expertise in a content area related to a planned intervention (WEAKNESS) but is considering partnering with another organization with complementary strengths in this area (OPPORTUNITY), this will help increase the probability of programme success.

2) If there is little capacity in an organization to collect, process, and analyze data (WEAKNESS), moving forward with a programme that requires the processing of a large volume of data for evaluation purposes would set the project up for failure. Identifying this in the early planning stages through a SWOT analysis allows the planning to include strategies to address this weakness, such as increasing the data handling capacity or assigning this task to an independent evaluation team (OPPORTUNITIES).