What we have delivered, for whom
- Westminster Foundation for Democracy – Public Policy Lab led the research and principal authorship of The Cost of Politics in the Maldives (2025), funded by the British High Commission, documenting campaign economics from primary elections through to the patronage expectations placed on sitting MPs.
- UNICEF Maldives – lead consultant on the national Child and Family Well-Being programme: original qualitative research with trauma-informed, confidentiality-first methods, a National Family Mediation Programme and Training of Trainers, relationship education, and Family Court digitisation.
- Ministry of Health, Family and Welfare – KnowHow, a searchable knowledge base spanning a 15-part social policy encyclopedia of over 340,000 words, statistics compendia, service provider mapping, and legislation and treaty tracking.
- GPE-KIX Regional Study on Educational Resilience – school enumeration across HDh, Seenu, and Kaafu atolls, delivered alongside eGen Consultants Ltd.
- Kulhudhuffushi City Council – a Registry of Residents, Land, and Vehicles to give the council a dependable base for service planning.
- National Library of Maldives – ongoing pro bono technical support: Social Council papers, action plans, surveys, focus groups, and stakeholder consultations.
Commissioning research in the Maldives
The Maldives is one of the most geographically dispersed countries in the world: around 90,000 square kilometres of sea and over 150 inhabited islands, many with populations under a thousand. Fieldwork means moving enumerators between islands that are hours apart by boat, and working in Dhivehi. Communities are small enough that a combination of marriage circumstances, approximate age, and island name can identify a person, so confidentiality needs deliberate design. Much of the data a study would normally start from does not exist, or sits unpublished inside institutions.
We work in these conditions all the time. We run our own field teams from the far north to the far south and conduct research in Dhivehi. In our family well-being research, participants agreed to speak on the strength of untraceability commitments that went beyond the norm for comparable studies, and we designed the protections to hold that promise. Organisations can bring us in for a whole study or for the parts that need local depth: design, fieldwork and enumeration, analysis, or delivery.
How the firm works
We publish a self-funded research programme of measurement studies, policy briefs, and interactive tools, free, on this site, because we want the questions answered whether or not anyone commissions them. We do sustained pro bono work for public institutions. We are non-partisan and have no party affiliation.
The same team has measured street widths across Malé, built a 340,000-word policy encyclopedia, run school enumeration across three atolls, designed training curricula, printed chapbooks, hosted film screenings and community events, and built web tools, dashboards, and data visualisations. People here are in policy because they find it interesting, and they read widely outside it, in literature, art, philosophy, and design. That shows in the reference points the work draws on and in the care that goes into how it reads and looks.
For a client this means one firm can take a project from research design through fieldwork, analysis, writing, systems, and training, instead of splitting those stages across contractors.
What we work on
Policy research and analysis, monitoring and evaluation, programme design, survey fieldwork and enumeration, training and facilitation, knowledge systems and data tools, and council development work including development plans, technical assistance, and investor materials. Our published research is the best guide to how we think: see the street parking measurement study, the numeracy work, or the full record of delivered projects.
Get in touch
Tell us what you are trying to find out or deliver. If part of the work would be better done by someone else, we will say so.
Contact us