Turning complex data into stories that move organizations to act.

When the pandemic hit, small businesses, especially BIPOC-owned and underbanked ones, struggled to access credit as banks pulled back. Calvert Impact Capital, CRF USA, and Kiva partnered with 12 Community Development Financial Institutions to build a blended-capital lending program. They needed to understand the program's real impact on recipients, not just how much capital moved.

I led the 60 Decibels fieldwork team through 287 phone interviews with California small business loan recipients between June and September 2022, covering borrowers from 12 CDFIs that had collectively distributed $73M across 1,334 loans between January 2021 and June 2022.

21% of borrowers said they would have closed permanently without the loan. 77% reported reduced financial stress, and 68% said they could better manage their finances than before. Nearly half were first-time borrowers, more than 3 in 5 were BIPOC-owned businesses, and 63% said they couldn't have found a good alternative to the fund.

The findings gave CDFIs, funders, and policymakers concrete evidence that blended-capital lending reached the businesses it was designed for and materially reduced closures among underserved small businesses, informing how future recovery lending programs get structured.

Meem Foundation needed a rigorous, third-party evaluation of Invest in Women for Lebanon, its women's economic empowerment program spanning 10 coalitions and 20 NGOs, reaching over 1,300 women. The evaluation had to hold up amid Lebanon's overlapping currency collapse and political crisis, and inform real funding decisions under real uncertainty.

I designed the evaluation methodology and coordinated 643 phone interviews across two waves, December 2023 to March 2024 and August to September 2024, working across multiple languages and NGO partners with varying capacity, and synthesized findings into decision-ready output for funders navigating extreme uncertainty.

The program drove strong results: an NPS of 66, 92% of beneficiaries said they couldn't easily find a good alternative, 86% reported an increased likelihood of achieving career goals, and about 90% felt more empowered.

This reframed how funders thought about program success. Confidence and skill-building were working, but weren't closing the gap in financial security that Lebanon's economic crisis had opened. It pointed directly at what future programming needed to address.

Kiva US had never had an independent, systematic look at the on-the-ground impact of its 0% interest, crowdfunded loans on US small business borrowers. They needed a rigorous read on borrower experience and equity outcomes, not just repayment data.

I co-led the first-ever independent impact assessment of Kiva US, conducting 502 in-depth phone interviews with a representative sample of borrowers, comparing outcomes for hub-accessed versus marketplace-accessed loans and disaggregating results by borrower race.

Kiva earned a Net Promoter Score of 85. Borrowers who accessed loans through a hub partner outperformed marketplace-only borrowers across five core indicators. But confidence wasn't equal: despite comparable loan outcomes, Black respondents reported meaningfully less confidence (60%) than White (68%) or LatinX (67%) respondents in their ability to access future capital.

The findings gave Kiva US and its partners concrete evidence separating loan-access equity from post-loan confidence equity, two different problems that need different solutions, directly shaping how they think about hub investment and borrower support going forward.

VisionFund needed to understand whether its FAST cashbox loan program for savings groups, spanning eight countries across Sub-Saharan Africa, was truly reaching the financially excluded and driving durable improvements in household well-being, not just measuring how much got disbursed.

I contributed to a two-year, two-phase longitudinal evaluation running from 2022 to 2024, covering initial and follow-up phone interviews with roughly 2,940 members across Senegal, Ghana, Zambia, Malawi, Uganda, Kenya, Rwanda, and Tanzania, tracking the same cohort over time to measure real change rather than a single snapshot.

93% of members reported an improvement in their quality of life, and 94% reported an improved ability to support their children, particularly around school fees and education. 77% reported an increase in their savings balance, and 9 in 10 said their ability to handle a financial emergency had improved.

The longitudinal design gave VisionFund credible evidence that cashbox lending drives lasting resilience, not just short-term liquidity, supporting continued investment in the FAST model across the region.