Our Work Insights
Research Coordinator/Manager Communications Coordinator/Manager
 

Our approach

 

Global Insight bridges the gap between research and practice. Our team of academic scholars and independent researchers produce data-driven, gender-sensitive, multi-methods empirical research that answers our most challenging questions in fragile contexts. We measure impact, provide evidence, and test assumptions around the root causes of conflict, displacement, and vulnerability.

 

We are experts in a range of quantitative and qualitative approaches, preferring to develop multi-method studies. Our commitment to scientific rigor is matched by our dedication to research that is unafraid of tackling sensitive questions and working in the most challenging contexts. Global Insight researchers work across sectors to identify, map, and measure the causal mechanisms at the root of conflict, displacement, and vulnerability. Our work often takes the form of applied research, program evaluation, and novel data science projects. We also offer one-off and full-series courses for those undertaking scientific multi-methods research, analyzing and interpreting data, and applying findings in fragile contexts and the Global Insight Institute. 

Global Insight scholars and independent researchers work in collaborative teams with the aim of adhering to the highest ethical standards, centering the wellbeing of participants, and encouraging research transparency. Research designs are frequently submitted for review by our panels of experts during annual network meetings. The feedback offered during these meetings promotes creative research design and the use of innovative instruments.

We seek to foster partnerships between practitioners, donors, and researchers. Findings from our work are shared with external audiences, including policymakers and donors, during events held throughout the year.

 

Our Team

Global Insight brings together academic scholars and independent researchers to provide empirical evidence that answers our most perplexing questions. In partnership with practitioners, policymakers, and donors our work informs evidence-based decision making and promotes innovative programs.

Untitled design.png
 

Sector Leads

Peace & Conflict

Dr. Siad Darwish

University of Melbourne

Dr. Siad Darwish is an anthropologist and peacebuilder specialized in gender and environmental peace and conflict. As an applied academic, Siad uses systems thinking to analyse and confront various intersecting forms of violence in theory and practice. Siad leads CDA Collaborative Learning Projects applied research into environmental peacebuilding and he has recently published guidance on the inclusion of masculinities into peacebuilding practice. As an independent consultant, Siad has worked with Conciliation Resources, the German Civil Peace Service, Mercy Corps, the Swedish International Development Cooperation Agency, UNDP, UN Women and private sector companies like the Economist Intelligence Unit and PricewaterhouseCoopers. Siad is a Research Affiliate at the Initiative for Peacebuilding at the University of Melbourne. He has taught at the University of Wollongong and contributed to research projects at Deakin University. His academic publications have appeared in Ethnos: A Journal of Anthropology, Anthropological Forum, and Cultural Anthropology’s Theorizing the Contemporary Series, amongst others. Siad holds a PhD in Anthropology from Rutgers University and an MA in the Anthropology of Development from the University of Sussex.

LinkedIn | Twitter

Dr. Siad Darwish

Jillian J. Foster

Founder, Global Insight & Department of Political Science, Yale University

Jillian J. Foster studies armed group recruitment and mobilization and the performative nature of political violence at Yale University. Prior to joining Yale’s Department of Political Science, Foster completed masters degrees in gender studies from University College London and data science from New York University. As a Gender, Peace & Security expert, Foster has spent over a decade designing and leading fifteen quasi-experimental and mixed-methods studies, along with fieldwork in 12 countries. She is the founder of Global Insight, a consultancy specializing in the use of gender-sensitive, mixed-methods empirical research in fragile contexts. Foster is the Principal Investigator for the Women in Conflict Project, a research initiative - data collection: Somalia/land (2019); Afghanistan (2017); Syrian, Kurdish, and Palestinian women in Lebanon (2015); Tajikistan borderlands (2011) - that recently launched a podcast of the same name and for the Independent Commission for Aid Impact (ICAI) joint review of conflict-related sexual violence and sexual exploitation and abuse.

Foster’s research has been supported by UN Women, CARE, the One Earth Future Fund, University College London, UNHCR and UNDP, in addition to the Yale University MacMillan Center Program on Refugees, Forced Displacement, and Humanitarian Responses Fellowship. Her work has informed programming and policy at UN DPO and DPPA, CARE, Plan International, World Vision, UNHCR, UN Women, the UN Trust Fund, the International Rescue Committee, and countless other INGOs. She has presented her research to academics and practitioners in Atlanta, Geneva, Ghana, Lebanon, New York, Tajikistan, Thailand, and Washington, DC.

LinkedIn | Twitter

Jillian J. Foster

Climate Crisis

Dr. Carla Handley

Arizona State University

Carla Handley is an environmental anthropologist working as an academic researcher with Arizona State University and as a research practitioner contracted by a variety of INGOs and non-profits in the environmental management and conservation space over the last 15 years. Her long-term research has focused on human behavioral adaptations to climate change, cooperative action in common pool resource management, resource conflict theory, and the ethics of conducting research with indigenous peoples and local communities. Since 2004, she has concentrated much of her research on working with small-scale African populations, particularly among the pastoral and nomadic communities of northern Kenya. She prioritizes participatory approaches to research design with an emphasis on co-designing research programming and information dissemination in concert with local communities. Carla holds a PhD in Environmental Anthropology from Durham University, an MPhil in Biological Anthropology from Cambridge University, and a BA in Anthropology and Hispanic Studies from Johns Hopkins University.

LinkedIn | Twitter

Dr. Carla Handley

[forthcoming]

 

Food Security

Dr. Naama Raz-Yaseef

Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory

Naama Raz-Yaseef is an academic researcher and evaluator focusing on agticulture productivity, food security, climate mitigation, and ecosystem resilience. Raz-Yaseef has over two decades of field research and data analysis experience, having led large-scale projects in Africa, the Middle East, Central America, the Arctic, and the United States. Her work has been published in peer-reviewed journals and presented globally, including in Mexico, China, Austria, and the US. Raz-Yaseef’s work centers on measuring, mapping, and understanding agriculture sensitivity to climate change. She has vast experience both in scientific data analysis for academic research and mixed-methods approaches for program evaluation. She led evaluations for clients including Lutheran World Relief, the Kingdom of the Netherlands and Wageningen University, and USDA. Raz-Yaseef is also a co-lead of California’s AB 617, a community-focused and community-driven project tasked with addressing air pollution disparities that result in disproportionately heavy health burdens for the most vulnerable communities in California.

LinkedIn

Dr. Naama Raz-Yaseef

Governance

Dr. Zoe Petkanas

Independent Researcher

Zoe received her PhD in Politics from the University of Cambridge, where she wrote her dissertation on women’s political participation in post-revolutionary politics, constitution drafting, and elections in Tunisia after 2011. She is now working on a book length project on the same topic as an American Institute for Maghrib Studies research fellow. She has nearly 15 years of research and MEL experience and has spent nearly a decade in the field. Her expertise includes democratization, women’s political participation, elections, political violence, constitutionalism, revolutionary politics, authoritarianism, and media in transition with a particular focus on the Middle East and North Africa.  


Linkedin | Twitter

Dr. Zoe Petkanas

Labor & Migration

[forthcoming]

Health

Dr. Stephen Wandera

Makerere University, Kampala, Uganda

Stephen Ojiambo Wandera (PhD) is a Gerontologist, Demographer / Population Scientist. He is a Lecturer and Chair of the Department of Population Studies, Makerere University, Kampala, Uganda (2006 – Present). He was a Postdoctoral Research Fellow of Fogarty International Centre of the NIH (2019-2021), and an Honorary Lecturer at the University of the Witwatersrand (2018-2021). Previously, he was a Postdoctoral Research Fellow of ICAP at Columbia University, Pretoria South Africa and the University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg, South Africa (2016-2017). He is a CARTA Cohort 2 graduate (2012-2016). 

His research focuses on vulnerable populations including children, women, and older population in Uganda. Among the ageing population, he focuses on inequalities in health and access to healthcare among older persons in Uganda. He also explores social determinants of health for older persons in sub-Saharan Africa. Recently (2021), he conducted a Scoping Review of “Cognitive Stimulation Therapy for older people with Dementia in Africa”. In 2018-2019, he led the first survey on ageism against older persons in Uganda, which led to diverse policy dialogues in Uganda. As a CARTA re-entry grantee (2017-2018), he investigated the “Determinants of HIV Testing among older persons in Uganda”. His PhD research (2012-2016) focused on “Disparities in health and access to healthcare among older persons in Uganda”. He aims to use experimental or intervention research designs in future to address the health needs of older persons in Africa. 

He has published 25 peer-reviewed journal articles and 7 book chapters and several technical reports on population aging, intimate partner violence and sexual and reproductive health: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/?term=wandera+stephen. 

He has attracted funding (over USD 500,000), supervised 7 masters and 66 undergraduate students. He is a mixed-methods researcher, trainer of Nvivo, STATA, SPSS, and an Associate Editor for BMC Public Health. He is a member of the TASO Research and Ethics Committee (2018-2021).

LinkedIn | Twitter

Dr. Stephen Wandera

 

Poverty & Inequality

[forthcoming]

Education

[forthcoming]

WASH

[forthcoming]

 
 
 

Featured Researchers

Anil Chaudhary

Independent Consultant and Development Researcher

Anil Chaudhary is a trained professional evaluator and development researcher having 11 plus years of experience in the field of design, monitoring, evaluation, research, and learning. He has worked in diverse sectors such as livelihood and agriculture, economic empowerment, sexual and reproductive health, family planning, maternal and child health, disaster risk reduction and management, humanitarian response, education in emergencies, technical and vocational education and training and food security, disaster response and public health are his primary focus areas of expertise. His professional experiences include full time employment in reputed international organizations such as SDC, UN-ILO, Heifer International, ADRA, and American Red Cross. In addition, he has undertaken several short term consulting assignments for international organizations (Human Practice Foundation, Islamic Relief Worldwide, The Johanniter International Assistance and Mercy Corps) either as a team leader or data lead.
He is a graduate with an advanced master’s degree in development evaluation and management from the University of Antwerp, Belgium. His technical expertise includes evaluation and research methodology design, development of data collection tools for mixed methods (household survey, KII, FGD, observation checklist), and setting up the questionnaire online using ODK, Kobo, LogAlto, Kinaki, and HarvestYourData. He is skilled at using STATA, SPSS, and R for quantitative statistical data analysis and Nvivo and Atlas.ti for qualitative data analysis. He has conducted social network analysis using UCINET as well. Competent at managing evaluation and surveys, he is excellent in communication with team and stakeholders using English and his native language Nepali. He is a beginner Spanish speaker. He has developed evaluation reports of a quality meeting the requirements of donors and different types; baseline, midterm, final project evaluations, and outcome evaluations. He is also experienced in developing lessons learned documents for non-profit organizations.

LinkedIn

Anil Chaudhary

Sevinc Rende

Independent Researcher

Sevinc Rende combines extensive practical field experience with an academic background. Her work focuses on designing robust social policy tools in countries without a mature welfare regime. She served as a policy and evaluation consultant for UNDP, ILO, UN Women, and donor agencies, such as SIDA and EU MADAD Fund. In addition, she worked closely with local, national, and regional teams in Eastern Europe, Central Asia, Southeast Asia, and the Middle East.

LinkedIn | Twitter

Sevinc Rende

Dr. Peter Onah Thompson

Appalachian State University

Peter Onah Thompson is an Associate Professor of Comparative Politics at Appalachian State University and an Affiliate Principal Investigator at Global Insight. He holds a Ph.D. in Public Policy from the University of North Carolina at Charlotte. His research expertise in forced displacement, development, climate change, and violent conflicts (including climate change-induced conflicts). Because of his passion and thematic expertise in these areas, he has been involved in high-level research supported by both the U.S. Army Research Office and the National Science Foundation. One of these is his doctoral dissertation: “Three essays on conflict and migration: experimental evidence from Nigeria” which examines how war-related induced mental health stressors impact the decision-making process of those forcefully displaced by violent conflicts. Methodologically, he loves mixed methods and is well vast in an array of quantitative methods including survey experiments and computational modeling techniques. His research has been presented in highly acclaimed international conferences and published in renowned journals and books.

LinkedIn | Twitter

Dr. Peter Onah Thompson

Morgan Richards-Melamdir

The Graduate Center of the City University of New York

Morgan Richards-Melamdir is a Principal Investigator with Global Insight and a monitoring, evaluation, and research specialist. She's spent the last decade facilitating data-driven decision-making in partnership with NGOs and government agencies, as well as research institutes and academia. Richards-Melamdir’s thematic work focuses on gender, inequality, poverty, livelihoods, and social policy, while her technical skills include quasi-experimental and correlative research design, qualitative, quantitative, and spatial data collection and analysis, and monitoring and evaluation system design. Her work has informed projects funded or implemented by UN Women, UNDP, ILO, World Bank, USAID, World Vision, Plan USA, WUR and others. Richards-Melamdir’s research and evaluation work includes projects in Lebanon, Uganda, Kenya, India, Nepal, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Mozambique, South Sudan, Sudan, Zimbabwe, Ghana, Haiti, Armenia, Georgia, and the United States. The results of her programmatic work and academic research have been featured in numerous conferences, a UN Think Piece, policy briefs, a technical journal, and the International Journal of Sociology. Richards-Melamdir completed a MA in Sociology with a focus on global inequality and women’s social and economic empowerment in 2012. She is currently a PhD candidate with research focused on gender, inequality, and social policy at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York.

LinkedIn | Twitter

Morgan Richards-Melamdir

Mannat Mehata

Independent Researcher

Mannat is a research associate at Global Insight where she conducts mixed-methods research and supports a variety of monitoring and evaluation projects, each with a unique on focus on gender. She has served as a team member for projects across more than 25 countries, including work with two UN Women regional offices. She has a degree in Economics and Political Science from the University of Wisconsin-Madison.

LinkedIn

Mannat Mehata

José Miguel López

Independent Researcher

Monitoring, evaluation, learning, and research specialist with about eight years of experience in the international development sector in the areas of human rights, governance, and criminal justice in developing and conflict-affected settings. He has advised initiatives related to crime and violence prevention (e.g. community, gender-based, youth, school violence), children in conflict with the law, access to justice, rule of law and police professionalization implemented in countries in Latin America and the Caribbean, Southern Europe, and South East Asia. He has comprehensive experience with the application of human rights and gender sensitive approaches to research and evaluation. Some of these evaluations have used experimental and non-experimental approaches. Furthermore, he has extensive experience with the collection and analysis of both qualitative and quantitative data from participatory and non-participatory methods. He has experience working with international development agencies, government ministries, local governments, CSOs, community-based organizations and community leaders. He has collaborated for projects funded/implemented by DfID, GAC, INL, UNDP, UN Women, USAID, among others.

Linkedin

José Miguel López

Dr. Peter O. Hayombe

Geneva Foundation for Medical Education and Research

Dr. Peter O. Hayombe is a monitoring, evaluation, accountability research, and learning expert on a wide range of public health issues. He has been a part of Maternal and New Born Child Health projects involving projects to remap, design and strengthen the healthcare delivery system in Africa, as well as in Family Planning, Malaria and TB, HIV and AIDS, Nutrition and livelihoods, Water, Sanitation and Hygiene projects. Some of his major projects include the coordination, planning, management, and implementation of the 2017 national Malaria Indicator Survey for South Sudan. He has previously coordinated two national Malaria Indicator Surveys in Sierra Leone and Guinea Equatorial. Hayombe is a tutor with Geneva Foundation of Medical Research and Education in Sexual and Reproductive Health Research.

LinkedIn | Twitter

Dr. Peter O. Hayombe

Dr. Sarah Littisha Jansen

Norman Paterson School of International Affairs, Carleton University

Sarah Littisha Jansen is a Global Insight Principal Investigator. She holds a PhD in International Conflict Management and Resolution from the Norman Paterson School of International Affairs at Carleton University in Ottawa. Jansen’s doctoral dissertation, 'Part of the Solution: Exploring Armed Non-State Actors Commitment to and Compliance with an Anti-Personnel Landmine Ban,' investigates the impact of peace negotiations on the renunciation of anti-personnel landmines by armed non-state actors. Her earlier research examined the impact of Serbian/Albanian bilingualism in Kosovo on sustainable peace in the region. She has taught courses on preventing conflict (re)occurrence and mitigating violence in armed conflict. As part of the Global Insight team, she co-authored an evidence, narrative, and policy review for World Vision International on the linkages between violence against children and violence against women and co-led the creation of a dataset on measures of gender equality over the last 25 years for a subset of 10 countries with large numbers of refugees and internally displaced people for the International Rescue Committee in advance of the 25th anniversary of the Beijing Platform for Action.

LinkedIn

Dr. Sarah Littisha Jansen

Esther Brito

American University School of International Service

Esther Brito is a researcher working at the intersection of international security, peace operations, governance, and gender. She has a Master’s in Women, Peace and Security from the London School of Economics and is a PhD Student at the American University School of International Service. She was a Research Assistant at the IESE Business School’s Department of Strategic Management, where she authored a book on mobilizing local governance to achieve SDG targets. Currently, she is a Junior Fellow in the War, Conflict & Global Migration think tank of the Global Research Network, the Editor-in-Chief of the IVolunteer International Writers Council, and the Academic Director of the ITSS Verona Summer School. Beyond this, she was previously a Global Shaper within The World Economic Forum, where she co-founded an NGO seeking to increase diversity in the entrepreneurial ecosystem.

LinkedIn

Esther Brito

Dr. Corrie Hannah

Arizona Institute for Resilient Environments and Societies, University of Arizona

Corrie Hannah is on the International Programs leaderhsip team with the Arizona Iniative for Resilience and International Development at the University of Arizona, which seeks to advance resilience scholarship in global contexts and promote research and educational opportunities related to international development. She also contributes to the Humanitarian Assistance Technical Support (HATS) iniative, where she is mobilizing a collaborative research agenda on HATS-related content with a team of university students, the broader HATS network, and the USAID Bureau of Humanitarian Assistance. Corrie’s current research topics focus on disaster recovery, equity in disaster management, knowledge production of disaster risk management, and the institutional and legal dimensions of displacement and migration due to climate change. Her research portfolio incorporates mixed quantitative and qualitative methods to study a variety of topics related to community-based environmental governance, water resource management, water security, food security/systems, and global environmental change impacts on rural communities. She has conducted research in Central Asia, sub-Saharan Africa, and more recently the Caribbean.

LinkedIn

Dr. Corrie Hannah

Dr. Adédédji Innocent Labiyi

University of Parakou, Benin

Adédédji Innocent Labiyi is Beninese, West African. He holds a Ph.D degree in Agricultural Economics and a Master’s Degree in Economics. He has a background in food and nutritional security. As a researcher, he participated in the implementation of projects and socio-economic studies in agriculture, food security, feedstuff, cattle markets, and climate change. He has also worked on several research projects in Burkina Faso, Senegal, Spain and Niger. Since 2012, he has been working as a researcher in the Laboratory of Analysis and Researches in Economic and Social Dynamics, at the Faculty of Agronomy, University of Parakou, Benin. He acquired excellent knowledge in reports, impact evaluation, scientific articles writing, survey implementation, collection of data, data management and especially data analysis using quantitative methods. In his profesional career, he has been involved in many projects in food, health and nutrition, funded by the World Bank Group and the government of Benin. He is currently working in social protection, nutrition and food security projects.

LinkedIn

Dr. Adédédji Innocent Labiyi

Isabella Cordua

Independent Researcher

Isabella Cordua is a Global Insight research associate with degrees in journalism and law from City, University of London. She has significant field experience in the development sector and has worked with a range of NGOs, governments and local communities in West Africa. Her work focuses on gender, criminal justice and child protection. Prior to joining Global Insight, Isabella led a research and advocacy project on the causes and consequences of women’s incarceration in Sierra Leone for the Cyrus R. Vance Center for International Justice. She authored the first comprehensive report on women’s incarceration in Sierra Leone and designed an advocacy campaign aimed at reforming the country’s criminal justice system. As part of her work for Defence for Children International – Sierra Leone, Isabella led the evaluation of a multi-partner project aimed at preventing child trafficking in Sierra Leone, Liberia and Guinea. In this capacity, she interviewed child survivors of human trafficking and presented policy recommendations to key child protection actors from across West Africa. Isabella works in English, Spanish and Italian.

LinkedIn | Twitter

Isabella Cordua

 

Dr. Sharon Attipoe-Dorcoo

Centers for Disease Control and Prevention

Sharon Attipoe-Dorcoo is currently a Senior Service Fellow at the CDC and a former board member of AcademyHealth, a member of the Education Council, and a research consultant. As a community scholar activist, she found her path from engineering into public health, and her work has involved engaging national mobile clinic programs to study community-based healthcare models to present evidence to inform policies in this area of care. The vision for her work is deeply rooted in culturally responsive and equitable tools for co-designing research and evaluation initiatives with communities, which she has manifested by leading both national and international research and evaluation projects. Dr. Attipoe-Dorcoo is a member of the Advancing Culturally Responsive and Equitable Evaluation Network, and has a certificate in Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion from the University of South Florida. She was recently voted as a parent member and Vice Chair of the local school council in Forsyth County.

LinkedIn

Dr. Sharon Attipoe-Dorcoo

Dr. Erin E. Thomason

Independent Researcher

Erin is an anthropologist with over 10 years of qualitative research with children, youth and families. Her speciality is ethnographic, person-centered and experiemental qualitative methods. For the last 12 years, Erin has been working in China, exploring the lived experiences of urban migrants and their families in rural areas. Her research attunes to family dynamics, socialization routines and stregnths based assessments with elder care takers. She earned her PhD from University of California, Los Angeles. Her research has been featured in Journal of Consumer Culture, Gastronomica and in an edited volume, Chinese Families Upside Down (2021, Brill).

LinkedIn

Dr. Erin E. Thomason

Emmanuel Osei-Mensah

Independent Researcher

Emmanuel Osei-Mensah is a graduate of the Kwame Nkrumah University of Science and Technology and hold a Master of Science Degree in Development Planning and Management. He is a Reviewer for the African Evaluation Journal (AEJ), Member of the European Evaluation Society (EES), the Africa Evaluation Association (AfrEA), Vienna Evaluation Network (VEN), Ghana Monitoring and Evaluation Forum (GMEF) and Sping International Association of Development Planner (SIADP). He has over 8 years’ experience in programme and project development, grants and policy monitoring, evaluation, learning and adaptation. Emmanuel has worked as a Monitoring and Evaluation Advisor and Specialist for development organizations such as Options Consultancy Services, The research People, Christian Aid (STAR-Ghana Programme), International Cocoa Initiative, Catholic Relief Services (CRS) and World Vision Ghana. He has also worked for the Institute of Local Government Studies (ILGS), Centre for Land Studies-KNUST, Consortium for Innovations in Human Settlement Development (CIHSD - The Consortium), AHD PRO Consult and the Tema Development Corporation (TDC).

LinkedIn

Emmanuel Osei-Mensah

Grace Wangui Muhoro

Independent Researcher

Grace Wangui Muhoro is an economic policy researcher with a Master's Degree in Economics from the University of Nairobi. She is passionate about data-driven policymaking geared toward solving economic and social problems, and her research interests broadly focus on economic development, international finance, and labor markets. She is particularly interested in sustainable development, public policy, and data analytics. She has had research publications featured by a Think Tank, Journal of World Economic Research, and her public policy reports explored public policy issues around road safety, international trade, public sector employment, remuneration, and productivity.

LinkedIn

Grace Wangui Muhoro