Our Global Development practice area focuses on strengthening government programs through applied research, evaluation, training, and capacity-building methodologies that promote continuous learning and adaptation. For the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID), Millennium Challenge Corporation (MCC), the World Bank, the British Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office, and other global donors, Cloudburst technical experts have worked in more than 65 countries across Africa, Asia, the Middle East, Europe and Eurasia, and Latin America and the Caribbean to:
- Ensure democracy, human rights, and governance.
- Enhance food security.
- Promote land tenure and property rights.
- Increase environmental compliance and sustainability.
- Foster natural resource management.
- Advance safeguards for vulnerable populations.
Cloudburst works to:
- Collect and analyze data.
- Monitor and evaluate programs.
- Communicate promising and evidence-based practices.
- Provide outcomes-focused training and capacity building.
Our team efficiently produces exceptional research within complex and challenging contexts using randomized controlled trials, quasi-experimental impact evaluations, performance evaluations, assessments, special studies, and more.
In our work, we identify and share promising practices and evidence, build the capacity of governments and local partners, and craft successful public-private partnerships. We have authored leading guidance and evidence-based research publications on democracy, human rights and governance; social safeguards; sustainable landscapes; and land tenure.
Cloudburst engages key stakeholders throughout the design and implementation of monitoring, evaluation, and learning activities and ensures that activities are responsive to local contexts and needs and include women, youth, and Indigenous population representation.
Global Development Capabilities Statements
Our Impact
Among other things, Cloudburst:
- Has created numerous templates, guides, and protocols related to conducting work with USAID that consolidate and build off the extensive expertise of local researchers and comply with USAID Automated Directives System requirements.
- Informs USAID’s program and strategy development through our insights into dynamics in countries undergoing political transitions such as Armenia, Ukraine, Sudan, and Zimbabwe.
- Translates findings into communications and training materials—such as data visualizations, interactive maps, videos, photo essays, and infographics—to bring data back to communities and stakeholders.
- Evaluated Mongolia’s property registration system to improve the system’s reliability, efficiency, ease of use, and affordability to citizens.
- Helped build an evidence base in sub-Saharan Africa on customary tenure, artisanal mining, and land administration and introduced best practices for measuring land governance and tenure security.
- Conducted a rigorous evaluation in Liberia to test a model of communal land certification that the Liberia Land Authority later adopted for use nationwide during land reform implementation
- Tracked the impacts of an agroforestry tenure intervention in Zambia, leading USAID to invest in scaling up and altering the pilot.
- Tested a resiliency-building model in Cambodia to help civil society organizations enhance network connections, diversify revenue streams, and adapt to environmental influences (i.e., COVID-19, etc.).
- Managed USAID’s Environmental Compliance Database, ensuring all USAID projects meet requirements to protect the environment, human health, and welfare.
- Designed a website of resources to support USAID missions’ and implementing partners’ project design for programming that impacts Indigenous peoples.
- Delivered important learning for MCC’s next generation of land investments through rigorous fit-for-purpose endline evaluations of MCC’s first-generation land administration programming with impact and performance evaluation components in Burkina Faso and Mozambique.
- Demonstrated how private-sector partnerships help provide skills-based training and job placement for at-risk youth in El Salvador for USAID’s YouthPower 2 Learning and Evaluation.
Recent Posts from the Global Development Team