Country: World Sources: IMPACT Initiatives, Swedish International Development Cooperation Agency Please refer to the attached file. Executive Summary Since 2023, IMPACT Initiatives has piloted the HESPER Scale across multiple crisis contexts to better understand how affected populations perceive and prioritise their needs. As a new tool, the HESPER Scale has provided valuable complementary insights to existing analytical approaches. Rather than replacing existing analytical frameworks, it introduces a people centred lens that captures how affected communities experience and express their needs. When used alongside standard multi-sectoral analysis, it helps build a more complete picture of humanitarian needs, combining measures of severity with insights into lived experience and perceived priorities. One of the key operational advantages of the approach is its ability to generate rapid insights. In several contexts, HESPER results have been used to inform early-stage discussions with donors and coordination platforms. By presenting community defined priorities at the outset of the Humanitarian Program Cycle, the tool has helped reframe strategic dialogue and encourage reflection on differences between measured and perceived needs. This early engagement represents a concrete opportunity to strengthen the relevance and responsiveness of humanitarian planning. Despite its added value, the implementation of HESPER has highlighted several operational and methodological challenges. These include the module’s length when integrated into large-scale assessments, the need to adapt questions to sensitive contexts, translation issues, and difficulties in aligning perception-based findings with some sectoral framework dimensions. These challenges underscore the importance of maintaining flexibility in using the tool, allowing for contextual adaptation while preserving a core level of comparability. Overall, the HESPER Scale represents a strategic opportunity to promote a more nuanced understanding of humanitarian needs by systematically integrating the perspectives of affected populations into analysis and decision making. Compared with other existing tools, its added value lies in supporting a shift towards more people centred responses. The use of the HESPER tool can generate additional evidence to strengthen advocacy for more relevant, accountable, and effective humanitarian funding, by ensuring that resource allocation and programmatic priorities are aligned with how communities themselves define their most pressing challenges. Based on these reflections, IMPACT Initiatives will, in the coming years, continue to refine and use the HESPER Scale to deepen understanding of community defined priorities and to test its application across research cycles and crisis settings. These reflections will also inform the development of an organisational analytical framework to better capture and analyse community priorities across crises. As a longer-term objective, IMPACT will strengthen the use of HESPER as a powerful advocacy opportunity to promote more nuanced, people centred analysis that informs both strategic discussions and operational decision making.