Douglas Brown

I am an expert in sustainable, resilient smallholder agriculture and the micro-economics of development at the household and community level and currently provide consulting services to those working in international agriculture development research and practice. For 10 years, I promoted sustainable, productive and resilient agricultural livelihoods across the World Vision (WV) Partnership. I have taught in the areas of international development and economics and conducted research in Cameroon and Kenya focused on the relationship between household resource management decisions, poverty and environmental degradation. Prior to this I worked for over 10 years at the grass roots level in agricultural and community development in the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC). Over the past few years, the focus of my consulting work has been on various forms of evaluation for a variety of international development organizations. (1) Country Program Reviews involve meeting with an NGO’s local partners and staff and evaluating relationships and alignment with organizational strategy using various qualitative research methodologies. (2) Project or program evaluations involve quantitative survey design, training of enumerators, data cleaning and statistical analysis in order to identify important changes (in, for example, food security or poverty) arising from the activities (e.g., agriculture or nutrition interventions) being promoted. (3) They also involve qualitative methodologies to understand what underlies the quantitative results. (4) Evaluations in Africa also involve cross-checking people’s perceptions with actual experience by incorporating data on rainfall and drought (for example) derived from satellite imagery into the statistical analysis. (5) Resilience involves the ability to weather a shock and recover without long-lasting negative impacts on food security or well-being. Much of my recent work has involved answering the question: to what extent do NGO programs in the developing world strengthen the resilience of households and communities to various shocks that they encounter in their daily lives?