We help you find out whether your social program is working

If your organization invests in an employment, income or poverty reduction program, we help you answer three questions: is it working, who is it serving, and what should change? You get the answer and also the tools to repeat the measurement whenever you need to.

Tell us what you want to measure   See how we do it

What is Kappa?

A firm that measures social programs with numbers and with people

Kappa Consulting Group is a Medellín firm founded by Carlos Ospino and Paola Roldán, two economists who have worked together since 2009. He spent more than ten years measuring employment and poverty at the Inter-American Development Bank and the World Bank. She has spent fifteen years evaluating social programs in Latin America, the Caribbean and the United States, through interviews, focus groups and fieldwork.

That is why we look at every program from two sides: what the data say and what the people in it tell us. The name comes from there: Cohen’s kappa is the measure researchers use to check whether two independent observers see the same thing.

Meet the team

Who we work for

Any organization with a program that needs to know whether it delivers

Multilateral and development agencies. Evaluations that meet your standards and arrive in time for the next operational decision.

National, regional and local governments. Knowing whether an employment or income program is reaching the right people, and leaving your team able to keep measuring it.

Foundations, NGOs and social welfare funds. Showing a board or a donor what changed because of the program, with figures anyone can check.

Companies with social or employment programs. Measuring the effect of your employability, training or inclusion programs, beyond counting how many people took part.

The problem we solve

Reports nobody can reproduce

Many organizations receive an evaluation report without knowing how its figures were calculated. The following year, updating them means hiring the same consultant again. And when the numbers and the interviews are done by two different teams, someone has to reconcile two reports that say different things.

The result is evidence that arrives late, when the program can no longer be corrected, and figures that are hard to defend before a board, a donor or an auditor.

Solutions

What you need to know, at each stage of your program

Before deciding: what is happening. How employment, income and poverty are moving in the population or territory you care about, without waiting for the official figure. Learn more about this service

When designing: a program that can be measured. Defining from the start what should change and how you will know, so the evaluation does not have to guess later. Learn more about this service

During and after: whether it works, for whom and why. How much people’s situation changed because of the program, and why, in a single report. Learn more about this service

At closing: your team carries on without us. Training so your staff can update the figures when the contract ends. Learn more about this service

How we work

Three steps, in this order

  1. We understand your question. What decision you need to make and what information you are missing to make it. Sometimes the question changes in this conversation.
  2. We measure with data and with people. Surveys and records to find out how much changed; interviews and focus groups to understand why. The same team does both.
  3. We hand over the result and how to repeat it. The report, in plain language and with concrete recommendations, together with the code and documentation behind every figure.

What sets us apart

Every figure can be recalculated

Everything we deliver comes with the code and documentation that produced it. Your team, or any reviewer, can check every number and update it with new data.

This is also how we produce our own indicators. TAPIL and IGIL track labor income poverty and inequality in Colombia every month, and none of their figures is typed by hand: each one comes from a program that is run again. See the latest figure

Get the labor poverty figure every month

Once a month we publish how labor income poverty is moving in Colombia, with a chart and a plain-language explanation, in Spanish.

Follow Kappa on Substack

Download Kappa’s overview (PDF)