About us
Two trajectories working together since 2009
Kappa brings together two skills rarely found in the same firm: measuring with data how employment and poverty change, and understanding, by talking with people, why a program works for them or not.
Our story
From academia to the multilateral banks, and back to a firm of our own
Carlos and Paola published their first joint paper in 2009, a study of who ends up in informal work. Both taught economics at Universidad del Norte. Since then their paths have parted and crossed again: he spent a decade between the Inter-American Development Bank and the World Bank Group, measuring poverty, inequality and labor markets; she led qualitative evaluations and technical assistance in monitoring and evaluation across Latin America, the Caribbean and the United States.
In those years they saw the same problem from both sides: evaluations that arrive when the program can no longer be corrected, reports the client cannot reproduce, and quantitative and qualitative teams that deliver separately. Kappa exists to solve it with one senior team and a working standard under which every figure can be rebuilt.
Our track record
What we have done
- Poverty and inequality. Chapters of Poverty and Equity Assessments, welfare policy notes and Poverty and Social Impact Analyses at the World Bank Group, and models to estimate the distributional impact of its lending.
- Labor markets. Occupational demand forecasting models built from online job postings at the IDB, and advice to government agencies on labor market taxonomies. See Morales, Ospino and Amaral (2024), under Resources.
- Qualitative evaluation. The evaluation of three Cash for Work projects in Haiti for the IDB, with a multiple case study design and nine focus groups, and technical assistance in monitoring and evaluation to six organizations in Honduras.
- Public policy. The Family Subsidy Office of Colombia’s Ministry of Labor and the Atlántico Socioeconomic Observatory.
- Our own indicators. TAPIL and IGIL, which track labor income poverty and inequality in Colombia every month. See the indicator
The founders
Carlos Ospino Hernández, Ph.D.
Applied microeconomist and economics lecturer, with more than twelve years of experience, ten of them at the World Bank Group (2020–2026) and the Inter-American Development Bank (2016–2020).
At the World Bank Group he led chapters of Poverty and Equity Assessments, welfare policy notes and Poverty and Social Impact Assessments, and developed statistical models to estimate the distributional impact of Bank loans and projects. At the IDB he built occupational demand forecasting models from online job postings and advised government agencies on taxonomies and ontologies for labor market analysis. He was assistant professor at Universidad del Norte and econometrics instructor at Universidad de los Andes, and executive director of Fundesarrollo.
He is the creator of TAPIL and IGIL, which bring forward each month the poverty and inequality figures Colombia only learns once a year.
Education. Ph.D. in Economics (2016) and M.A. in Economics (2005), Universidad de los Andes; B.A. in Economics, Universidad Tecnológica de Bolívar.
Methods and tools. Causal inference, panel data, microsimulation, distributional analysis, machine learning. Python, Stata, R, SQL, Git, LaTeX.
Languages. Spanish native, English fluent, French intermediate.
Paola Roldán Vásquez, Ph.D.
Economist and social researcher with more than fifteen years of experience across Latin America, the Caribbean and the United States, split between university teaching, research and consulting.
She was assistant professor in the Department of Economics at Universidad del Norte (2011–2014 and 2015–2017) and adjunct lecturer at Universidad de La Salle (2011–2014), teaching Econometrics I and II and Impact Evaluation at undergraduate and graduate level.
For the Inter-American Development Bank she led the qualitative evaluation of three Cash for Work projects in Haiti — road paving, water infrastructure and community public spaces — using a multiple-case study design, nine focus groups with direct and indirect beneficiaries and community leaders, and a methodological proposal to scale evaluation across a portfolio of 608 subprojects. She provided monitoring and evaluation technical assistance to six partner organizations in Honduras, including the design and analysis of pre/post surveys and Stata training. She served as Deputy Director of the National Family Subsidy Office at Colombia’s Ministry of Labor and headed the Atlántico Socioeconomic Observatory at Universidad del Norte.
Education. Ph.D. in Social Work (2025) and Certificate in Gender, Sexuality and Women’s Studies (2023), Virginia Commonwealth University; M.Sc. in Environmental and Natural Resource Economics, Universidad de los Andes / University of Maryland; B.S. in Economics, Universidad del Valle.
Methods and tools. In-depth interviews, focus groups, multiple-case study, reflexive thematic analysis, Photovoice, participatory methods; survey design, logical frameworks, indicators, impact evaluation. NVivo, Dedoose, Stata, R.
Languages. Spanish native, English fluent.
Delivery capacity
For field operations and larger assignments we work with local teams and academic partners, under our own methodological supervision and data quality protocols.