Evaluation Services
We evaluate humanitarian, development, recovery and peace programmes, and the policies and public funds that shape them. Independent, mixed-methods, and scored on an instrument that reports what the evidence can and cannot carry.
What is different
The Strategic Integrity Score and the Evidence Confidence Index are scored separately, on the same weights, and never blended. You always know how much weight a finding can bear.
Politics, institutions, outcomes, protection and cost are read in parallel rather than as five chapters in turn. A programme is judged as an interacting system, because that is what it is.
If a programme is harming the people it serves, no volume of output overrides that. The method caps a rating when protection fails, and the cap is visible in the report rather than buried in an annex.
Every evaluation closes with reform options, priorities and a roadmap. Findings are written to be acted on, not filed.
Service lines
Scopes are written around your decision. If a question needs a method we would not stand behind, we say so before the contract, not in the limitations annex.
Independent evidence on programmes, policies and funds, at whatever point in the cycle the decision falls.
Independent evidence of what a programme achieved. Baseline, mid-term, final and real-time designs, scored against OECD-DAC criteria with the rigour donors expect.
Know the starting point before you spend. Survey and qualitative tools, a measured baseline, and a design you can later measure against.
Credible field data on a short timeline: fast-turnaround collection, market assessment and rapid needs checks for humanitarian responders.
Original research on themes we know deeply, including GBV, humanitarian systems, civic accountability and resilience.
Design and governance evaluation of policies, statutes and sovereign funds, including social return on investment architecture.
Four stages, from your question to your decision. Each one has a named deliverable you can hold us to.
We agree the questions worth answering. A design matched to your decision, not a template: evaluation questions, criteria, sampling, and the standards the work will be held to.
We collect the evidence ourselves. Mixed-methods data gathered by teams who work across languages and difficult terrain, and who know how to gather it safely.
We score performance and confidence. Both dimensions, scored transparently against OECD-DAC, UNEG and AfrEA standards, with the protection cap applied where warranted.
We hand you options, not just findings. Reform options, priorities and a roadmap, written so a board or a donor can act on them line by line.
The instruments behind the scores, and the limits we publish alongside them.
A scoring framework that reports performance and evidence confidence as two separate findings. It is the intellectual property of Samwel Ochieng Onono and is applied under his authorship.
The evidence band fixes the strongest verb every product of an evaluation may use. A thin evidence base cannot produce a confident sentence.
Politics, institutions, outcomes, protection and cost are scored in parallel, so an interaction between two of them is visible rather than inferred.
Figures are traced upstream to the document that issued them, with publication date and data vintage recorded. Conflicts between sources are shown, not silently resolved.
Document review, administrative data, survey work, key informant and group enquiry, contribution analysis and scenario analysis, combined to fit the question.
A protection or safeguarding failure caps the overall rating regardless of delivery performance, and the cap is stated on the face of the report.
The phase most evaluations skip: making sure the evidence reaches the decision it was built for.
Turn findings into influence. Evidence synthesis and briefing products written for the people who decide, not for the file.
An embedded evidence function for multi-year programmes and consortia: continuous research and adaptive learning instead of a single study.
Structured review of what a programme learned, what it changed, and what it is still avoiding.
Where a client agrees, findings are published open access with full method notes, so the evidence outlives the contract.
Where an organisation needs the measurement function itself built, not only evaluated.
Indicators, tools, data flow and a reporting rhythm your team can actually run, and that donors credit.
An evaluation expert on call: a monthly block of advisory time for programmes without senior in-house MEAL capacity.
Independent review of data quality and of draft reports before they reach a funder.
Specialist design, SOP and referral-pathway expertise for GBV and protection programmes, where generalist advice is not credible.
Practical training in evaluation design, data collection, donor compliance and grants management, delivered with embedded follow-through.
Sectors
Each sector below links to published CASA NEXUS evidence where we hold it. Where it does not, we have not published in that area yet and say so.
Evaluation and analysis of humanitarian response in hard-to-reach settings, including strategy work on how the international system adapts to conflict, climate and compounding crisis.
Evidence: The INGO Reckoning: A Post-Trump Adaptation. Save Lives or Shape OutSpecialist depth in GBV, safeguarding and protection, scored as its own dimension in every evaluation rather than as an annex to delivery.
Infrastructure finance, sovereign funds, revenue mobilisation, expenditure credibility and debt sustainability.
Evidence: Kenya NIF: What the Evidence ShowsInstitutional performance, rule of law and the accountability mechanisms that decide whether evidence changes anything.
Evidence: The Uhuru Kenyatta Administration, 2013–2022Contextual analysis and evaluation of recovery programming and climate resilience, with attention to what holds after a programme closes.
Outcome evaluation across health, education and social protection, using national statistical series alongside primary field data.
Evidence: The Kibaki Administration, 2002–2013Selected work
On client disclosure
Client engagements are not listed publicly. The projects below are CASA NEXUS work published on the firm's own initiative, where there is no client confidentiality to protect. Commissioned evaluations are disclosed only with the client's written agreement.
An independent baseline evaluation of the National Infrastructure Fund Act, 2026, completed on the day the Act was signed into law, with a Social Return on Investment tracking architecture attached.
Sixty years of Kenyan executive government scored on a single instrument that does not move between volumes. Four volumes issued of a five-volume series.
Work with us
Send the terms of reference, or just the question. We will tell you what evidence it would take and what we can deliver.
