With an emphasis on financial inclusion, gender and agriculture, we help organisations to get the most out of their COVID-19 relief funds.

For that, we offer a diversity of services:

Together with our network of local associates and consultants, we offer a combination of tools and local knowledge that help you to better understand the current needs and challenges faced by your clients. By exploring COVID-19’s impact on your clients – as well as the root causes – we can situate your clients’ voice in the broader perspective of the pandemic.

To do so, we examine the political, social and economic measures taken to mitigate COVID-19 at the local, national and global levels. We augment this with insight generated from prior work in financial inclusion, agricultural development, gender and impact assessment, evaluation and learning.

A needs assessment provides you with a robust dataset to inform qualitative and strategic decision-making over the lifetime of your COVID-19 relief. It also helps you to move beyond the short-term needs of your clients and identify ways to better understand and steer the long-term impact of your relief funds. Meanwhile, it enables you to provide detailed feedback to your donors and other stakeholders.

Components of our COVID-19 Needs Assessment

• We can assess (either quantatively or qualitatively) how COVID-19 affects different value chains and market system components. This includes the effect of steps taken by public or private institutions to mitigate the impact of the pandemic.
• Using a living income framework, we can assess the pandemic’s effect on client households. To do so, we identify which income streams are impacted by COVID-19 and the local costs and systems that impact livelihoods.
• We can identify resilience measures for specific market segments or end-users (e.g. farmers, women, youth, etc.).
• We present assessment outcomes in attractive visual formats and/or in an interactive dashboard. KIT has expertise combining contextual macro data (e.g. socio-economic trends) with outcomes of structured stakeholder surveys and qualitative data collection methods, providing comprehensive and actionable insight into your data.
• We can regularly check-in with your clients to better understand and meausre COVID-19’s impact over time.

Segment Clients

We can help you segment your clients into groups that make statistical sense to compare in the context of your COVID-19 relief (e.g. smallholder farmers, micro-, small- and medium-sized enterprises (MSMEs), women, youth or informal workers. To do so, we use AI and the expertise of our network of locally-based consultants.

Impact frameworks for relief, emergency or liquidity funds

• With our extensive knowledge of various market segments and groups (e.g. smallholder farmers, youth, women, etc.) and our access to consultants in many low- and middle-income countries, we can design a segmented impact pathway/theory of change, providing a framework for what to measure and how.
• We also have deep gender knowledge. This enables us to add a ‘gender lens’ to any relief measure and provide a framework and/or benchmark to assess the needs of women and girls and the pandemic’s impact on them.

Impact assessment

Understand the impact of your COVID-19 emergency relief measures

• We can conduct rapid surveys with digital tools. This allows us to conduct high-quality research from a distance.
• We can present them in a comprehensive and interactive manner.
• This allows you to better interact with your data – searching for linkages on different levels of disaggregation – while triangulating your quantitative and qualitative results with different data sources to provide nuance and context.

Capture and present lessons learned

• We have deep experience helping our customers to document lessons learned in a structured way, helping you to more effectively use this information in the future.
• We can design the methodology, conduct surveys and interviews and develop a practical report, to be used as a basis for trainings and/or feedback to various stakeholders.

Workshops and trainings

With a combination of the services above, we can design tailor-made trainings, webinars or workshops for you or your clients to present impact assessment results, learnings, or to dive deeper into your findings, root causes and solutions.

Strategic advice and technical assistance

With our diversity of in-house expertise, we can combine our knowledge of financial inclusion, gender and impact assessment with knowledge of the agriculture and seed sector, the coffee and cocoa sector, the global sustainability agenda, and global health.

Please contact our experts below to discuss in further detail what we can do for you.

*KIT Royal Tropical Institute does not operate an independent COVID-19 relief fund. As such, we are not in a position to offer COVID-19 relief funds, whether through individual grants or loans. KIT provides services to help other organisations make the most of their COVID-19 relief investments.