Method behind Measuring Change

Field Research

Rigorous primary research in the places it is hardest to do well, built around direct contact with the people a transition affects.

The most important evidence about a technology is held by the people living inside it: the rider financing an electric motorcycle, the farmer deciding whether the kiln is worth the labour, the ranger who knows the reef better than any satellite. The Lab's field research exists to reach that evidence, systematically, ethically, and to a standard that holds up. It is the capability behind our own published research, made available to others.

Where the evidence is hardest to gather, and matters most

The Lab works in settings that defeat conventional research: low-connectivity, multilingual, informal, dispersed. These are also the settings where bad evidence does the most damage. Running research well here demands researchers who speak the language, know the place, and understand the working lives of the people they talk to.

Grounded in real engagements: electric transport in Nairobi (Kenyan e-mobility case), decentralised clean energy in Lombok (Pyropower), water transparency in Nairobi (MiMaji), and five years of sustained fieldwork in Kenya. We do not parachute in. We work through people already part of the context.

A researcher takes notes while a woman speaks, seated in the doorway of her home. A recorded, consented interview in the setting the respondent lives in.
We go to the places where people live and work, in their language, on their time. Depth is a function of place as much as of question.

Mixed-method research, run properly

What we bring
  • Interviews and qualitative fieldwork. Structured, in-depth conversations that reach past what happened to why. See the interview guide.
  • Surveys at scale. Standardised, repeatable, by phone or face-to-face. Short enough to re-run; rich enough to move a decision.
  • Baseline, midline, endline. The before-and-after spine of any impact claim. Uses the impact-tracking template.
  • Observation and on-site work. Some things are only visible in the doing.

Most research fails in one of two directions: too elaborate to repeat affordably, or too thin to tell you anything new. Our standard is the middle: structured enough to compare, rich enough to matter.

A researcher holds a phone displaying a mobility survey with the title 'Kibera Mobility Study'; a respondent in a cap sits opposite, thinking through the answer. A boda-boda motorcycle is parked behind them.
A mobility survey in progress in Kibera, Nairobi. Structured instrument, in-person delivery, one respondent at a time. Every answer is a person, not a row in a dataset.

Ethics and rigour are not optional extras

Informed, recorded, revocable consent. Anonymisation by default. Sampling, translation, and quality control managed end to end. We interview to understand, not to confirm.

Ethics standards we work to

Consent, anonymity, and independent review

Every study passes an internal ethics check against these references:

Commissioned work belongs to the client and stays private unless the client chooses to publish. The case studies on this site are those exceptions.

Who this is for

Companies Funders Consortia NGOs Researchers

See Who We Serve for how the fit works in each case.

For how a study runs end to end, see How It Works. For measurement, see Impact Measurement. For why household-level reporting can flatter a programme that has shifted control of income, see Resilience Is Downstream of the Buyer. For why remote verification quietly removes the incidental social evidence field visits used to produce, see The Cheaper It Gets to Verify, the Less Anyone Visits. To discuss a study, see Contact.