Audiences
Five kinds of organisation come to the Lab. Each with a different decision in front of them, each needing evidence they can act on.
Different audiences arrive with different questions. Most engagements combine more than one of the Lab's services. Every card below names the mix that tends to fit, and links you straight into it.
A product that works in one market doesn't automatically work in the next. Before you commit a scaling budget to an assumption, we go and see.
The signal from a new market is usually ambiguous: are those early sales real demand, or the founder's network? Do the segments from home even exist here? Is the payment stack the one your ops team assumed? We reach the people whose behaviour will decide the outcome and report what they actually do, want, and can afford. We read the strategy through the BRW framework to name the barriers you are bypassing, repurposing, or weakening, and where the fit breaks.
Most engagements start with an entry read and continue as measurement once you're live. See the mobility case study for what that looks like end to end.
Services that fitWhich of the investments in your portfolio is actually working, in a form that travels across very different projects and holds up under scrutiny?
Self-reported success from grantees is rarely comparable and never independent. We measure what a portfolio genuinely changes, for whom, and through what pathway, against internationally standard evaluation criteria, and we do it independently of the grantee. Standardised instruments turn a one-off assessment into a trajectory you can manage over time. Every figure on the dashboard is one someone has been sent to check.
Services that fitYour Grant Agreement commits the consortium to monitoring, evaluation, and a proper dissemination and exploitation plan, and the funder expects proof, not intent.
It is easy to set up channels and hard to show they reached anyone. Done late, it becomes a scramble at the final review. The Lab acts as your independent measurement and dissemination partner, set up with the consortium at the start, run throughout the work packages, closed with evidence that survives the periodic and final reviews.
Whether the programme is working, and for whom, not a report written to reassure a board.
You need someone who can reach the people you serve, in their language and their context, and report what they actually find. We work in the settings that defeat conventional research: low-connectivity, multilingual, informal, dispersed. Impact is read across reach, depth, and experience, so the finding is not just how many were touched, but how materially things changed, what the change feels like to the people inside it, and who was left out.
Field cases: MiMaji in Nairobi, Pyropower in Lombok.
Services that fitYou have the design. You need a partner who can carry it into difficult field settings with real technical understanding of what is being studied.
Not a survey firm that treats the technology as a black box. Trained researchers who know the place and the language, working with people who understand how the systems actually work. We can run the fieldwork, design the instruments, or co-author the analysis, and we hold the work to a standard that survives peer scrutiny. Published tools live in Resources.
Services that fitBeyond commissioned work, the Lab publishes its own research openly, because some questions deserve answering whether or not a client is paying for it. See the articles for what we have written.
Not sure which fits? Tell us the decision you are facing and we will tell you honestly whether research can help. See Contact. For the full range of services, see What We Do.
Start a study
Send a short note about what you need to know and who it concerns. We will come back with an approach, a timeline, and an honest view of what evidence can and cannot settle.
