Social development
Our main areas of expertise include:
- Poverty and policy analysis, particularly through frameworks which emphasise the multidimensional nature of poverty and draw on key concepts such as vulnerability and risk;
- Conducting and supporting research and analysis of the distributional impacts of policy reforms and interventions on different stakeholder groups (i.e. how different groups benefit from or are disadvantaged by development projects, programmes and policies) and how these can be addressed and managed;
- Supporting policy makers and implementers to analyse, understand and manage the specific political, institutional and social contexts within which they operate to improve policy design and implementation effectiveness;
- Undertaking and supporting the use of participatory methods and processes to provide both quantitative and qualitative data for use in policy design, implementation and monitoring and evaluation. Participatory methods and processes aim to include citizens and service users in policy cycles and can help facilitate increased citizen voice and service provider accountability;
- Monitoring and evaluation, particularly through combining quantitative and qualitative methods, to 1) measure the different impact of interventions on different groups of people and 2) measure the different dimensions of poverty, particularly those that are not readily quantified but which poor people themselves identity as important, such as dignity, respect, security and power.