Research & advisory
Six services. Most engagements combine two or three of them — a baseline study that needs an instrument built, an evaluation that ends in a donor report, a programme team that wants to run the next round themselves.
Written as the standard offering of a Mekong environmental and social research organisation. Cut anything MESRI does not do — an overstated capability list is worse than a short one.
The question, the sampling frame, the instruments and the analysis plan — settled and written down before a single household is visited. We pilot instruments with the enumerators who will actually administer them, because a question that is awkward to ask is a column of unusable data later.
Running the round: enumerator training, deployment, supervision, and validation while the team is still in the field rather than after they have gone home. We use MESRI Data Hub and KoboToolbox for this, and we can run it on your existing stack instead if you have one.
Baseline, midline and endline rounds; indicator frameworks that programme staff can actually maintain; and evaluations that report what did not work alongside what did. Where a result is inconclusive we say so rather than dressing it up.
Impact assessment and due diligence for projects that touch land, water and livelihoods in the Mekong basin — screening, baseline characterisation, affected-community consultation, and the mitigation and monitoring plans that follow from it.
Quantitative and qualitative analysis written up in the format the audience reads — a donor template, a policy brief, a board paper, or a workshop with the programme team. Bilingual English and Khmer throughout, not translated as an afterthought.
Training so the next round does not need us: instrument design, data collection discipline, validation, and analysis. Delivered to the team that will do the work, in the tools they will use, in the language they work in.
Programme teams who need a defensible baseline, an evaluation their donor will accept, or a data process that stops eating field staff time.
Independent studies and evaluations of funded work, with findings reported at their real level of certainty.
Applied research on environmental and social change, and support to teams building their own data capability.
Environmental and social assessment, safeguards work and monitoring for projects affecting land, water and livelihoods.
Fieldwork partnership, instrument design and data collection capacity for research programmes in the region.
Commercial field operations — the work that produced Route Plan.
You do not have to use our software to work with us, and we do not charge you for it as consultancy. But when an engagement involves field data collection, this is what we run it on.
Survey templates, deployment to KoboToolbox, validation on sync, and the report at the end. Where phases 3 and 4 of an engagement actually happen.
Call plans, live visit tracking and delivery dispatch. Built for Cambodian distributors, and useful anywhere a team has to visit a long list of places in a sensible order.
Next step
Send the terms of reference, the concept note, or three sentences about the problem. We will come back with what we would actually do, what it would take, and whether it is worth doing at all.