What we can do for you

High-performing organisations and programmes commit to learning from reality: distilling data and information, listening to the experience and expertise of their staff, and taking time to understand their impact on the ground. Our clients help us understand their aims, their operating context and the influences at play. We help them define the questions, prepare the tools and gather the data to bring timely, relevant insight. Credible, robust evidence is the foundation for building confidence, demonstrating effectiveness and satisfying accountability.

Organisations working in complex environments rarely have perfect information or fixed plans, and the strongest are willing to act on the best available evidence, test their assumptions and adjust course as they learn. Our clients help us understand the decisions they face and the pressures shaping them. We help them weigh the options, set out the trade-offs and judge where and how to adapt. Sound decisions are easier to make, and to defend, when the reasoning behind them is clear.

Delivery depends as much on people, internal systems, data and ways of working as on the programmes they support. Organisations that invest in these foundations run more efficiently and make better use of what they already hold. Our clients help us understand how they currently work and where the friction lies. We help them develop their people, organise and use their data and information, examine and improve their processes, and work through change. Better foundations free up time and attention for the real work.

The volume of data available to organisations has never been greater, but information on its own changes little. What matters is the meaning drawn from it, and how well that meaning reaches the people who need it. Our clients help us understand their audiences and what they need the evidence to do. We help them bring findings together, draw out what they mean, and present them in a form people can take in and act on. Well-curated evidence is far more likely to be used than comprehensive evidence no one reads.

The challenges our clients work on rarely sit within the boundaries of a single organisation. Results depend on how actors, incentives and relationships fit together across a wider system. Our clients help us understand their role and the relationships that shape their contribution. We help them analyse the context, model the dynamics and influences at play, and strengthen the partnerships and networks that carry change. Understanding the wider picture is what allows a single contribution to add up to something larger.

Climate change and environmental decline are reshaping the conditions in which all development and humanitarian interventions take place; we help clients design, evaluate and learn from responses that hold up under those conditions, from locally-led adaptation to national resilience strategies.

Conflict is now the dominant driver of poverty and displacement globally and we support clients in fragile and conflict-affected areas in conflict-sensitive ways. Across a growing peacebuilding portfolio, we work with clients to provide expertise spanning the triple nexus, conflict mediation, resilience, diplomacy, Women, Peace and Security (WPS), peacebuilding, humanitarian mine action and international humanitarian law.

Hunger persists less from a shortage of food than from failures in the systems that grow, move and price it; we map those systems and help clients test what genuinely shifts them towards resilience and sustainability. We help partners advance more resilient and sustainable food systems, applying a systems perspective to unravel the complex, interlinked stakeholders, relationships, and feedback loops that shape food security and nutrition.

Displacement is now typically protracted rather than temporary; we work with clients to assess and strengthen refugee responses and migration management in both fragile and conflict affected settings and development settings across MENA, Africa, Asia and Europe, exploring support across the humanitarian-development-peace nexus, transitions towards durable solutions, and the strengthening of national systems.

Health gains are hardest to sustain where systems are weakest; we help UN agencies and global health organisations strengthen delivery across expertise areas including immunisation, SRHR, GBV, HIV/AIDS, TB, malaria, and cancer, and evidence what their programmes actually achieve, and to strengthen their contribution to SDG 3: ensuring health and well-being for all.

Access to water is where climate pressure is felt first, and its effects are felt throughout public health: unsafe water and inadequate sanitation and hygiene drive disease, malnutrition and mortality, particularly among the most vulnerable. Our work is grounded in the ambition of SDG6 , providing universal and equitable access to safe and affordable drinking water, and adequate and equitable sanitation and hygiene for all. As such, we advise our clients on WASH policy and practice across humanitarian and development contexts, where rising demand and increasingly contested allocation decisions put both water security and public health at risk. Our overriding aim is to contribute to positive and lasting change for those who suffer from water, sanitation and food insecurity, and the health consequences that follow, in the face of growing pressures such as climate change and increased demand.

GESDI shapes who holds power, who is heard, and who benefits from any intervention, which is why we treat gender equality, disability and social inclusion as both a distinct area of expertise and a lens applied across every assignment we deliver.