Consulting Team

Jason Agar, (BA (hons) in Law, MBA, MA Development Studies) Managing Director, with over 27 years experience of private sector and 20 years of development work.  He joined Kadale having run his own successful UK consulting firm providing research, consultancy and training for private sector support organisations in the UK, Asia and East/Southern Africa.  Prior to that, he was Director of the Network Unit of the Small Business Centre at Durham University Business School and had a successful career in private sector.  His areas of expertise include Public-Private (and Policy) Dialogue, Making markets work for the poor (M4P), Micro-finance, Business Development Services and value-chain analysis and related problem solving processes.  He has been involved in the development of national policies, legislation and strategies for the private sector development in Malawi over the last ten years.

Dr. Gillian Mann, (BSc (Hons), ACMA, MSc, PhD) Director and Health Economist, has been with Kadale for 13 years bringing 21 years Consulting, Accounting and Health Economics expertise from the UK, Australia and Malawi.  She has worked in the private, public, academic and NGO sectors and been involved in health issues from community to policy level.  Dr Mann has considerable research experience at community and household levels, from small scale qualitative to large-scale quantitative surveys. Her area of specialism is equitable acces to health for the poor, in which she is a recognised international expert. As a result, she has consulted in many countries on this issue, but particularly Malawi, Pakistan, Nigeria and Burma for DFID, EU, WHO and others. She has published extensively on this and related health topics. She works closely with the Liverpool School of Tropical Medicine.   She is now based in the UK, but regularly visits Malawi on assignment

Don Watson Kalonga, (BSc in Statistics & Computing), Researcher and Analyst, is a full time Kadale Consultants employee. He has considerable field research experience, particularly in quantitative research. With a background in Statistics/Mathematics, he has been involved in data analysis (SPSS/Stata/SAS/R) for a range of socio-economic and academic research assignments. He was involved in data collection, data entry and data analysis for Demand Analysis study Mobile Money in rural and urban Malawi for USAID/FS Share; an access to services study for vulnerable (cash transfer beneficiaries) for UNICEG and government; and a dairy programme evaluation for Land O’Lakes. He is currently working as part of a team on a financial literacy study for Reserve Bank of Malawi. In 2010, he studied factors affecting gender imbalance in work places, a case study of four banking institutions in Blantyre. In 2008, he modeled the relationship between secondary school students’ performance in mathematics and class size.

Toby Lewis-Donaldson, (BSc. (Hons) Economics – Pending), Research Co-ordinator, is an Economist with a proficiency in econometrics. He worked in rural Malawi as a teacher and in rural Kenya with a local OVC project prior to joining Kadale. He has experience in designing and implementing research methodologies and leading fieldwork teams on both quantitative and qualitative research projects. Since joining Kadale he has he has developed expertise in issues regarding access to finance having co-ordinated a quantitative demand analysis for M-money in Malawi, the piloting and design of a nationwide financial literacy questionnaire for the Reserve Bank, as well as providing analysis of the FinScope financial database to the Kadale Project Manager in the design and communication of a major change to Old Mutual Malawi’s product portfolio. His work has involved development of instruments, testing, recruitment and training of enumerators, managing the logistics and preparing the sampling frame. Beyond that the role has involved managing data entry and cleaning, preparing data tables, and undertaking analysis and reporting.

We have a core team of Malawian Researchers that we can contract from a pool of tried and tested freelancers when needed.  This gives us the capacity to undertake large field based research projects to a high standard at short notice in the major local languages.