02/Services
Six service lines.
Research, measurement and training — delivered to publication standard and written for the people who have to act on it.
01/Service line
Applied economic research & policy analysis
Original research on development economics, labour markets, public finance and social policy. Written to publication standard, delivered in formats decision-makers can act on.
Full studies and shorter analytical pieces, produced to the standard of a peer-reviewed paper and written for the person who has to make the decision.
Labour market, employment and gendered outcome studies
Public finance and expenditure analysis
Policy advisories and formal submissions to boards and regulators
Evidence synthesis and literature review for programme design
Peer review and second opinions on analysis produced elsewhere
02/Service line
Monitoring, evaluation & impact assessment
Theory of change, indicator frameworks, baselines and endlines, and rigorous impact evaluation including experimental and quasi-experimental designs.
Measurement designed around an exit condition — what would have to be true for the programme to stop being needed — rather than around activity counts.
Theory of change and results frameworks
Indicator design, with disaggregation specified at the design stage
Baseline, midline and endline studies
Experimental and quasi-experimental impact evaluation
Independent review of evaluations produced by others
03/Service line
Survey design & field data collection
Instrument design, sampling, enumerator training and supervised mobile data collection, with trained field teams resident in the counties where we work.
Primary data collection where the record does not exist, run by field teams resident in the counties concerned.
Instrument design and cognitive testing
Sampling design and power calculation
Enumerator recruitment, training and supervision
Supervised mobile data collection with quality control
Data cleaning, documentation and handover
04/Service line
Public finance & budget analysis
Budget execution and absorption analysis, expenditure tracking, audit review and gender-responsive budgeting support for county and national institutions.
The county fiscal cycle, read closely: what was budgeted, what was released, what was spent, and what the gap between them means.
Budget execution and absorption analysis
Expenditure tracking and revenue diagnostics
Audit report review and follow-up analysis
CIDP and ADP support and costing
Gender-responsive budgeting support
05/Service line
Data products & visualisation
Dashboards, indicator trackers, cleaned open datasets and analytical briefs that turn technical records into information non-specialists can use.
Turning technical records into something a non-specialist can act on without a statistics background.
Dashboards and indicator trackers
Cleaned, documented open datasets
Analytical briefs and data visualisation
Reporting formats your own team can rerun each quarter
06/Service line
Training & capacity building
Practical data and analysis training for county staff, civil society organisations, research teams and young people — taught on real local data, not worked examples.
Taught on real local data, not worked examples — because the skill that transfers is handling records that are messy in the way real records are messy.
County staff training in analysis and reporting
Civil society and community organisation data skills
Research team methods training and mentorship
The Lamu Data Lab, free to participants
How engagements are set up.
Scoping is free. Describe the problem and you get an honest read on whether it is worth doing. If you do not need a consultant, you will be told that.
Pricing is by scope, not by hour. A written proposal states the deliverable, the timeline and the fee before anything starts. Public-interest and county work is priced differently from commercial work.
Data stays yours. Datasets, code and documentation are handed over at the end of every engagement. If an engagement leaves you dependent on this firm to read your own numbers, it was done badly.