We illuminate systems, elevate equity, and enable action.

Mary leads multi-country, multi-partner evaluations to OECD-DAC standards. She uses contribution analysis, outcome harvesting, Most Significant Change and theory-of-change reconstruction to trace how and why change happens. Her work covers agriculture and food systems, climate adaptation, WASH, rural and urban livelihoods as well as policy and advocacy. She has delivered work for, or funded by, the Austrian Development Agency, Irish Aid, Global Affairs Canada, the European Union, the Gates Foundation and the Mastercard Foundation.

Her evaluation and research practice rests on deep gender expertise. She has led institutional gender audits, designed gender strategies and MEL frameworks for multi-partner consortia, and developed diagnostic tools and handbooks that help African institutions build gender equality into their policies and practice. Before founding ODIP she was Director of Solutions for Women & Marginalised Groups at Shell Foundation in London, and she has held senior gender roles with Tearfund UK and Tanager International. Earlier she spent more than a decade leading community programmes in Eastern Africa.

Mary holds a PhD in African Studies and Anthropology from the University of Birmingham, UK. She has published peer-reviewed research, blogs, op-eds, books and book chapters on gender relations, youth aspirations and women’s economic empowerment. Mary lives in Oxford, UK with her family.

His evaluations use mixed methods, contribution analysis, outcome harvesting, process tracing and theory-of-change approaches. A particular strength is systemic change analysis: understanding how changes in the behaviour of market actors, and in the wider policy and business environment, add up to the transformation of a whole sector.

At Gatsby Africa (2018–2024), Paul was Senior Manager for Talent and Skills Building. He built an MSD competency framework and a competency-based performance management system and embedded them across the organisation. He also led Gatsby Africa’s organisation-wide MSD skills strategy. In addition, he was the internal evaluator on the full assessment of the Kenya Commercial Forestry Programme, analysing change at the micro, meso and macro levels.

Before that, at TechnoServe East Africa, he managed the Gates Foundation-funded Innovations in Outcomes Measurement programme in Kenya, Tanzania and Uganda. The programme tested predictive models and technology-based tools for tracking outcomes for smallholder farmers. Paul also led a nationwide youth entrepreneurship programme that reached 300,000 young people. Separately, he designed entrepreneurship and life-skills training for adolescent girls in Nairobi’s informal settlements, which helped more than 3,000 girls develop business plans and secure seed grants.

Paul holds a Doctor of Business Administration in Strategic Management and an MBA in Entrepreneurship from United States International University–Africa, and a BSc in Food Science and Technology from Jomo Kenyatta University of Agriculture and Technology.

Farai’s core expertise is quantitative and mixed-methods analysis. This includes designing indicators, targets and means of verification for multi-country programmes and aligning MEL and results frameworks. It also includes analysing data broken down by sex, age and social group to show who benefits from development programmes and who is left behind.

Farai’s research and advisory work covers agriculture, food security and nutrition, social protection, migration and remittances, labour, health and education. Clients have included the World Bank, IFC, ILO, CGAP, the Commonwealth Secretariat and Girl Hub. In Zimbabwe, Farai led a World Bank research project on transfers, agricultural investment and food security in rural households, working with the Ministry of Lands, Agriculture and Rural Resettlement, the University of Zimbabwe and the national statistics agency. In Kenya, Farai worked with Kimetrica to design the trigger mechanism for scaling up a UK government-funded cash-transfer programme in drought-prone regions. In Ethiopia, Farai provided econometric analysis to government ministries for their policy reports. Farai’s career began at the World Bank Group in Washington DC, which included managing CGAP’s Pro-Poor Innovation Challenge programme.

At Sussex (2011–2025), Farai served as Associate Dean, Professor of Economics, Reader in Economics, and Director of Teaching and Learning, and supervised postgraduate research on gender, water governance, climate change, nature-based solutions and biodiversity. Outside the university, Farai delivered Theory of Change training to the FCDO’s Asia Pacific Directorate. Farai holds a PhD and an MSc in Economics from the University of Sussex and a BA in Mathematics and Economics from Mount Holyoke College, and has published seven peer-reviewed journal articles and contributed to two books.

His coursework covers data structures and algorithms, statistical analysis, operations research, machine learning, front-end and back-end web development, server administration and cybersecurity.

Cato worked as a junior data analyst intern at Lima Labs. Before that, he supported research projects as an independent research and data analyst, handling data entry and data visualisation and helping teams keep to project timelines.

For his final-year project, Cato is developing a weather prediction and early-warning system for Kenya, a subject close to ODIP’s work on climate adaptation and resilience. The system brings together live weather data from external services and readings from existing weather sensors. It uses machine learning models, including Random Forest and Decision Trees, to predict risks such as heavy rainfall, flooding and extreme temperatures. Through an interactive dashboard, it sends automated alerts and produces downloadable reports. Building it draws on skills that carry straight into evaluation work: data cleaning and preparation, model training and validation, and database design. Cato works with Python, scikit-learn, Pandas, PostgreSQL, React and Docker.

He is known for working carefully, collaborating well and delivering on time.