What we do
Analysis, advice, and practical support to turn evidence into policy and action
We support organizations to navigate the gap between evidence, policy, and practice in real-world contexts where decisions need to be made quickly, approaches have to adapt over time, and the everyday interaction of social dynamics and institutional structures shapes what is possible.
Our work focuses on understanding the relationships of people, systems, and institutions, and what this means for policy and program outcomes, with particular attention to how different perspectives meet across social roles, levels, institutions, and sectors.
Drawing on applied social science approaches and cross-country experience, we provide analysis, strategic advice, and practical support to help partners design and implement approaches that are at once evidence-informed and fit for context.
Bringing together our experience and research, we help partners see patterns, make informed choices, and adapt approaches to their own environments, ensuring policies and programmes are effective and sustainable.
Our areas of support
We apply a structured approach developed experience across countries and sectors to bridge evidence, policy, and practice:
Clarify context and key challenges
Build a clear, evidence-informed understanding of what is happening and why, including social and institutional factors shaping outcomes
Analyse dynamics shaping policy and practice
Identify the drivers of behaviour, relationships, and everyday practice, influencing policy and programme effectiveness.
Design policy and programme responses
Translate insights into actionable strategies, policies, and interventions tailored to context and accounting for real-world constraints.
Enable effective implementation and adaptation
Work alongside partners to ensure that policies and programmes are implemented effectively and adapted as needed over time.
Strengthen learning and capacity
Guide teams and organisations to ensure shared approaches, strengthen learning, and apply this to future decision-making.
Outputs
Our work is tailored to your needs and context, whether providing rapid advise for urgent decisions or more in-depth support over an extended period. We deliver clear analysis and recommendations, decisive policy and programme strategies, rigorous fieldwork for evidence building, expert practical guidance and tools, and collaborative processes to support informed decisions and effective action.
Selected Work
Worked with WHO and national partners to address challenges in trust between communities and health systems, where increasing refusal of childhood vaccination was widely attributed to religious adherence.
Reviewed existing in-country research, conducted cross-country analysis, and led ethnographic research across four sites in Kazakhstan to better understand the drivers of vaccine refusal. This work showed that hesitancy was driven primarily by trust in the health system rather than religion. Brought together these findings with experience from other settings to clarify the key factors shaping barriers to collaboration, and to demonstrate how religious institutions could play a constructive role in supporting vaccination efforts in the local context.
Advised on policy and programme approaches to strengthen engagement between health services and religious institutions, and facilitated dialogue among national stakeholders to align perspectives and agree practical next steps. This work shaped a national action plan for intersectoral collaboration and strengthened partners’ ability to engage communities on childhood vaccination.
Strengthening trust between communities and health systems
Co-creating a health intervention for displaced Ukrainian Roma
Worked with multilateral and third-sector partners in Poland to address challenges in childhood vaccination uptake among displaced Ukrainian Roma communities, where cultural and religious factors were assumed to be driving low engagement and vaccine confidence.
Building on earlier research we conducted with the community, which highlighted the importance of co-creation when working with displaced and Roma populations, we designed and led a participatory intervention bringing together community members and health workers to articulate challenges and develop practical responses.
Through implementation and evaluation, we demonstrated how a collaborative approach can address systemic factors such as anti-Roma bias, exclusion, and institutional constraints. The process showed how research can be translated into practical approaches to strengthen access to services.
By demonstrating both the opportunities and challenges of co-creation in practice, this work provided national partners with a replicable model for building trust and improving access to services in similar contexts.
Understanding and addressing barriers to HPV vaccine uptake across countries
Worked with WHO and country partners to address challenges in HPV vaccine introduction and uptake, where coverage was expected to remain uneven and existing approaches were not reaching key populations.
Led qualitative research and stakeholder engagement across key settings within each country to identify structural, contextual, and behavioural factors shaping uptake, and to bring together evidence and partner perspectives to guide decisions on how immunisation programmes could respond effectively.
Advised on the content and structure of national strategies and implementation plans, supporting partners to adapt delivery and communication approaches to local realities, strengthen engagement with underserved groups, and improve their ability to monitor and respond quickly to emerging challenges, with partners adopting and applying these approaches in practice.