Our Global Development practice conducts agenda-setting research, rigorously evaluates development interventions, and translates and builds capacity on innovative practices to promote land tenure and property rights; increase environmental compliance and sustainability; enhance food security; ensure democracy, human rights, and governance; and advance harmonization of social safeguards.
Our teams of experts are skilled at evaluation designs and data collection methodologies that incorporate quantitative, qualitative, and geospatial techniques for large and small organizations and interventions. We are skilled at conducting assessments and special studies including desk studies, program reviews, data quality assessments, political economy analyses, meta-evaluations, and biodiversity analyses. Our work also includes providing global technical assistance and support in environmental compliance.
Cloudburst applies a collaborative approach to our work, engaging key stakeholders throughout the design and implementation of monitoring, evaluation, and learning activities and ensuring that activities are responsive to local context and need. Our work often includes ensuring representation of underserved or marginalized populations including women, youth, and indigenous populations to ensure their voices and experiences are accounted for.
Cloudburst is experienced at translating findings into strategic communications and training materials—such as data visualizations, interactive maps, videos, photo essays, and infographics—to distill information into easily shareable content for wider consumption by clients and other development stakeholders. We have devised innovative methods to bring data back to communities through visualization methods in culturally competent formats to empower local action and change.
Our work also contributes to academic and policy discourses through peer-reviewed journal publication and presentations of key findings and innovative methods at international conference proceedings.
Our clients include the United States Agency for International Development (USAID), the Millennium Challenge Corporation (MCC), and the British Department for International Development (DFID). We have experience working in South, East, and West Africa; Asia; Eastern Europe and Eurasia; and Latin America and the Caribbean.
Our Impact
- Our insights about dynamics in countries undergoing political transitions (i.e., Armenia, Ukraine, Sudan, and Zimbabwe) and associated program and learning agenda recommendations informUSAID’s program and strategy development. For example, in Armenia, we identified a promising new anti-corruption partner that future programming targeted.
- In Mongolia, for MCC, Cloudburst evaluated improvements to the property registration system designed to improve the system’s reliability, efficiency, ease of use, and affordability to the average citizen.
- In sub-Saharan Africa, Cloudburst contributed significantly to building an evidence base on customary tenure, artisanal mining, and land administration, and introduced best practices for measuring land governance and tenure security. Our rigorous evaluation in Liberia tested a model of communal land certification that the Liberia Land Authority later adopted for use nationwide during land reform implementation, and our reporting of impacts of an agroforestry tenure intervention in Zambia led USAID to invest significant resources to scaling up the pilot as well as altering project components.
- In Cambodia, our team is testing an innovative resiliency-building model that will help civil society organizations protect against organizational shocks by enhancing network connections, diversifying revenue streams, and adapting to environmental influences including the unexpected influence of COVID-19.
- Cloudburst has led efforts for USAID to track environmental compliance requirements through development of the Environmental Compliance Database achieving process improvement efficiencies and standardization in ensuring all USAID projects meet mandatory environmental conditions to protect the environment, human health and welfare.
- For USAID, Cloudburst designed a website to house resources for project design and information on indigenous peoples to support USAID Missions and implementing partners in successfully executing programming that impacts indigenous peoples.
- For the USAID YouthPower 2 Learning and Evaluation, Cloudburst showcased the importance of private-sector partnerships in providing skills-based training and job placement for at-risk youth in El Salvador.