Our Projects

Female entrepreneurs tend to have lower levels of education, less access to relevant business information, and face higher childcare and household demands, restricting their ability to attend traditional training and networking activities. As such, the World Bank’s Africa Gender Innovation Lab (GIL), the Innovations in Financing Women Entrepreneurs (IFWE) project, seeks to pilot, scale up, and evaluate new approaches to empowering Ethiopia’s women entrepreneurs. IFWE works with Mercy Corps to bring its existing MicroMentor platform, which facilitates digital connections between mentors and mentees, to the Somali Region in Ethiopia. Kimetrica and its subcontractor, Effect X, are conducting an exploratory qualitative study of the MicroMentor pilot intervention, using focus group discussions and semi-structured interviews, to understand local cultural views towards business mentorship, as well as expectations, experiences, challenges, and successes using the MicroMentor platform. This information will equip the World Bank to provide female entrepreneurs in Ethiopia with the most effective support required to overcome their unique set of challenges.

A key component of Kenya’s Agriculture Sector Transformation and Growth Strategy (ASTGS) is to leverage digital technologies in agriculture to increase small-scale farmer incomes, improve year-round food availability, and boost household food resilience for the most vulnerable. To this end, the World Food Programme (WFP) and the National Drought Management Authority (NDMA) are working to digitize their seasonal assessment resources, which are used to track elements of food stocks, production, trade, and consumption, among others. Kimetrica is improving and strengthening the use and function of WFP’s existing seasonal assessment resources by creating custom user-friendly dashboards and data warehousing solutions. The proof of concept and corresponding report will determine next steps towards building a sustainable approach for WFP to capture, manage, and improve the value of the seasonal assessment resources over time for the Kimetrica Food Security Steering Group (KFSSG) member organizations.

USAID's Regional Integration and Stronger Economics (RISE) indefinite-delivery/indefinite-quantity (IDIQ) mechanism is designed to increase cross-border trade in select product value chains and enhance regional economic integration to overcome barriers to trade and strengthen the region’s ability to absorb, adapt, recover and transform in times of shocks and stress. Under this IDIQ, Palladium (Kimetrica’s prime) is carrying out the East Africa Market Systems (EAMS) Task Order (TO) to achieve an increase in intra-regional trade, create new cross-border partnerships or market linkages, add investment for regional trade finance and commercialize new agricultural technologies. As a subcontractor to Palladium on the EAMS TO, Kimetrica is developing data-driven maps and visualizations to support trade flow analysis in the region, as well as developing resilience monitoring tools that build on existing technologies using state-of-the-art data mining and machine-learning techniques. To further define surveillance needs, Kimetrica will engage with stakeholders and collaborate with institutional partners in the region.

The UNICEF Innovation Fund provides early stage funding and support to frontier technology solutions that benefit children and the world. UNICEF’s Innovation Fund issued Kimetrica a Long Term Agreement (LTA) to back the development and use of open source frontier technology solutions. The LTA will be used by UNICEF offices and other UN Agencies worldwide to solicit and issue contracts based on the needs of requesting offices. Kimetrica will provide UNICEF’s Innovation Fund with services to support the testing, piloting, deployment, customization and further development of frontier technology solutions in UNICEF’s programs. Kimetrica was selected based on  its experience and expertise in advanced modeling, data management, information capture, and custom software development. This LTA follows Kimetrica’s previous UNICEF Innovation Fund grant to conduct proof of concept research for MERON.

USAID’s Kenya and East Africa (KEA) Mission is leading critical efforts to promote learning through evaluation, performance monitoring, knowledge management, and research throughout the region. USAID/KEA’s Evaluations, Assessments and Analyses (EAA) IDIQ enables the procurement of regular evaluations, assessments, and analyses for learning to improve effectiveness and accountability of activities in the region. As a holder of the seven-year IDIQ, Kimetrica is positioned to design and implement both quantitative and qualitative research, lead on knowledge management, and develop and deliver evaluation and assessment training to as many as 11 USAID Missions in the region, as well as to USAID implementing partners, and local institutions. Kimetrica’s EAA IDIQ partners include Social Impact, Forcier Consulting, and TANGO International.

Building Self-Reliance for Refugees and Host Communities by Improved Sustainable Basic Social Service Delivery Programme (BSRP) is a UNICEF Ethiopia-led effort to improve service delivery in health, nutrition, WASH (water, sanitation and hygiene), education, and child protection. In 2019, Kimetrica and subcontractor Causal Design conducted a qualitative mid-term evaluation of the programme using 171 key informant interviews (KIIs) and 20 gender-disaggregated focus group discussions (FGDs) with program beneficiaries that covered the service delivery sectors across five regions of Ethiopia, including Afar, Benishangul Gumuz, Gambella, Somali, and Tigray. Work was carried out by gender-balanced teams fluent in the main languages of each region and focused on beneficiary perceptions of program performance. Kimetrica reported on the programme’s effectiveness, efficiency, and sustainability by conducting a comparative analysis, a context analysis, and high-level stakeholder mapping, which informed the Foreign, Commonwealth & Development Office’s (FCDO) decision on the proposed BSRP extension. This project is a continuation of the BSRP: Baseline Study which Kimetrica also conducted.  

Following severe drought conditions during Senegal’s 2019 agricultural season, the African Risk Capacity (ARC), a specialised agency of the African Union, paid out a total of USD 35.6 million through disaster risk insurance policies held by the Government of Senegal (GoS) and the StartNetwork, a collection of NGOs focused on humanitarian assistance. This type of insurance policy is designed to release funds quickly, saving valuable time in assisting vulnerable populations affected by disasters before a larger, but often slower, humanitarian response can be put in place. The GoS and the StartNetwork are currently using this funding to distribute immediate assistance in the form of food distribution, livestock feed distribution, direct cash assistance, and nutrition supplementation for children under-five and pregnant and lactating women. As part of the evaluation process, the ARC contracted Kimetrica to carry out an independent process audit to assess the GoS and StartNetwork’s effectiveness, efficiency, and compliance with the ARC’s standard operating procedures that articulate how the insurance payout is to be distributed to support the emergency response. Using its expertise in surveys, interviews, and spot-check validations, Kimetrica conducted an evaluation of the GoS and StartNetwork’s operations, implementation, and delivery processes with the goal of informing the ARC learning process. By providing valuable insight on program reach, implementation quality, and beneficiary satisfaction, these insights proved to be vital in helping the ARC and member country governments improve their methods and guidelines for future policies and payouts.  

The Office of Transition Initiatives (OTI) at USAID carries out rapid interventions relevant to the political and stabilization needs of communities and governments, in response to major political or conflict crises and opportunities as they emerge across the world. The Support Which Implements Fast Transition (SWIFT) 5 - Support Indefinite Delivery/Indefinite Quantity (IDIQ) Contract is a five-year mechanism with a ceiling of $2.5 billion managed by USAID/OTI, which provides flexible and targeted support to local organisations in some of the world’s most challenging environments as they transition out of conflict, political crises or natural disasters. Kimetrica’s role for this IDIQ is to recruit and deploy long-term technical assistance personnel to advance USAID/OTI’s program operations working to effect positive change around the world.

Every year, thousands of Filipinos are affected by natural disasters, losing their lives, livelihoods, and homes to severe weather events. Over several years, with support from the World Bank, the Government of the Philippines (GoP) has worked to provide financial protection for communities against such events. The Philippines parametric catastrophe risk insurance program represents a key milestone in these efforts. From 2017 to 2019, the GoP placed two parametric insurance policies on the international capital markets. The first policy (2017/2018) provided over $200 million in coverage for communities at risk of typhoons and earthquakes. The second policy (2018/2019), doubled this coverage. The program insured two types of coverage: one for 25 provincial governments against emergency losses from major typhoons and another for National Government Agencies against emergency losses from major typhoons and earthquakes for national government assets (based on losses in the 25 provinces). As part of the closeout process for the two-year pilot, the World Bank commissioned Kimetrica to conduct a Lessons Learned Evaluation to better understand the successes and challenges of the program. The results informed the growing evidence base on parametric insurance and was used to inform similar potential programs in other countries. The evaluation involved a desk review, key informant interviews with a variety program stakeholders, analysis of data, and a final report of lessons learned.

Kimetrica is designing the Monitoring, Evaluation, and Learning (MEL) Framework for the World Bank’s Global Risk Financing Facility (GRiF). GRiF is a Multi-Donor Trust Fund that awards grants to test, pilot, and scale different types of disaster risk financing instruments such as parametric insurance products, catastrophe bonds, and surge financing linked to shock responsive social protection systems. Securing financing in advance helps vulnerable countries better manage the financial impacts of disasters, shocks and crises. The comprehensive MEL Framework includes (i) the design of a Theory of Change diagram and narrative, (ii) the development of a results framework and reporting structure, (iii) the identification of key evaluation questions, (iv) the creation of a rolling evaluation plan, and (v) the buildout of a learning and communications platform of activities. Kimetrica used a utilization-focused approach for the design of the MEL framework, ensuring that the intended users of research findings (GRiF stakeholders) are engaged in decision-making around the design of each study. In complex programs such as GRiF, questions of attribution are difficult to answer using traditional (and more rigid) experimental or quasi-experimental evaluation designs. As such, Kimetrica designed the system using contribution analysis for the analytical framework, through which the World Bank can capture, analyze, and build its evidence base in disaster risk finance.