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Research & Monitoring

Evidence you can defend, in weeks rather than quarters.

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Most Big Decisions Rest on Anecdote

A senior opinion. A competitor's move. A few memorable customer comments at an event. That becomes the evidence base for a decision worth millions.

The usual alternative is worse: a study that costs more than the decision it informs and lands as a report nobody has time to read.

Research Built Around Your Decision

We start from the decision you need to make, then design the smallest study that answers it credibly.

Instrument design, fieldwork, quality assurance, analysis, and a working session with your team. You keep the data.

What you get

  • A research design tied to a specific decision
  • Questionnaires, discussion guides, and observation protocols
  • Fieldwork across Kenya and the region, using local enumerators
  • GPS, timestamp, and back-check validation during collection
  • Analysis triangulated across quantitative and qualitative data
  • Plain-language findings, presented live to your leadership team

What This Covers

  • Data Collection & Surveys

    Questionnaire design, enumerator training, and fieldwork across the region, with quality checks built in, not bolted on.

  • Feasibility & Landscape Studies

    What already exists, what it costs, and what would have to be true for this to work.

  • Customer & Stakeholder Research

    Interviews, focus groups, and segmentation. What your customers value, in their words.

  • Market & Competitive Research

    Sizing, pricing benchmarks, and competitor positioning. Where you actually stand.

  • Programme & Impact Evaluation

    Baseline, midline, and endline designs that satisfy funders and tell your team what to change.

How We Work

  1. 01

    Frame the Decision

    We agree what you would do differently depending on the result. That sets the sample, the method, and the budget.

  2. 02

    Design & Pilot

    Instruments are tested on a small group first. An ambiguous question is cheap to fix now and expensive to find later.

  3. 03

    Field & Verify

    Supervised collection with back-checks throughout, and progress updates while there is still time to act on them.

  4. 04

    Report & Present

    Findings in plain language, then a working session with your team. You keep the dataset and the documentation.

What to Expect

Decisions you can defend
Evidence for the moment a board member or funder asks why.
Weeks, not quarters
Focused scans in two to three weeks. Full surveys in six to ten.
Findings your team reads
Plain language and a live session, not a PDF that gets filed.
You own the evidence
Raw data, instruments, and documentation stay yours.

Where This Has Been Needed

What clients came to us with, in their words. Names withheld by agreement.

Healthcare · Development funding

“We are behind on what we promised a funder, and cannot explain why.”

When a plan underperforms, the useful question is not how far behind it is. It is whether the mechanism it depends on was ever real.

A co-funded programme to create jobs for young healthcare workers was well into its second year and far behind target. Establishing what had actually happened meant rebuilding staff payment records from three unstructured ledgers before a single job could be counted. The finding was that the target had never been reachable: the assumed link between business growth and sustained employment did not exist, which the board received before more money followed the plan.

Labour market intelligence · Kenya

“We are making decisions about this market on assumption.”

Text is the most underused asset most organisations hold: complaints, reviews, survey comments, support tickets. It only became analysable at scale recently.

What employers in Kenya actually require was guesswork, because the evidence sits scattered across a decade of job adverts nobody had read together. Keyword search cannot answer it: it finds the word without finding the meaning, so the whole corpus was indexed by meaning instead, grouping roles that describe the same job in different language.

Common Questions

A focused market or competitor scan runs two to three weeks. A multi-county survey runs six to ten. If your deadline will not support a defensible sample, we say so rather than quietly cutting corners.

Yes, across Kenya and the wider region. We recruit and train enumerators locally, which gets better response rates and costs less.

GPS and timestamp validation, back-checks on a share of every enumerator's interviews, and anomaly monitoring during fieldwork rather than after. Where we find a problem, we recollect.

We report them anyway and help you present them. Research that only ever confirms the existing view is not worth commissioning.

Have a Decision Worth Getting Right?

Tell us the decision. We will scope what it takes to answer it: including if research is not the right spend.

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