Humanitarian, protection response and evaluation
Evaluation of the Welcome: Refugee Integration in Italy programme, UNHCR. Mixed methods end term evaluation
Study to explore private sector solutions for forcibly displaced people in Europe. A mixed methods study with strong focus on private sector behaviours, UNHCR
Evaluation of the Covid-19 emergency response package in Sahel region, UNHCR
Study to explore the impact of Boko Haram on women and girls in the Lake Chad region, UN Women
Gender and Women’s Rights
Gender differences in entrepreneurial activity, including access to finance — European Parliament FEMM Committee. Research examining structural barriers to women’s enterprise across Member States.
Gender aspects of the economic downturn and financial crisis on welfare systems — European Parliament. Comparative analysis of how austerity and welfare reform affected women across Europe.
Gender aspects of the EU Youth Employment Package — European Parliament. Evaluation of how the Package addressed young women’s labour market disadvantage.
Gender balance in the media sector — European Parliament. Research on representation and decision-making across European media organisations.
Women in decision-making: the role of new media for political participation — European Parliament. Research on digital tools as a route into political life for women.
Violence Against Women
Stepping Up Against Violence Against Women and Girls in South East Asia — UN Women. Evaluation of a multi-country regional programme.
Domestic sexual abuse of girls — European Parliament. Research on prevalence, response and policy gaps.
Access to shelters for undocumented migrant women fleeing domestic violence — European Parliament. Legal and practical assessment across Member States.
Preventing the perpetration of domestic violence and abuse — Home Office. Policy development and research on what works to stop perpetration upstream.
Gender-based violence among gang-affected youth — Home Office Domestic Abuse Research Programme. Scoping study and intervention co-design.
Deployment of extended family in domestic abuse perpetrator programmes — Home Office Domestic Abuse Research Programme.
Caring Dads Cymru evaluation — Welsh Assembly Government. Impact and process evaluation of a programme for abusive and neglectful fathers.
One-to-one intervention for high-risk perpetrators of domestic abuse — Buckinghamshire and Milton Keynes Councils. Evaluation and development of an innovative perpetrator programme.
Rapid Evidence Assessment of domestic violence perpetrator and violence reduction education programmes — Buckinghamshire County Council.
Female Genital Mutilation (FGM) prevention research — Department for Education. Two evaluation projects on identifying risk and reducing harm to girls.
Long Term Agreement, FGM reduction programme — UNFPA. Evaluation partner for the global FGM reduction programme.
Reducing sexual aggression in the night-time economy — Drinkaware. Evaluation of a national behaviour-change campaign.
See also the College of Policing rapid PRISMA reviews under Workflow Engineering for Research.
Workflow Engineering for Research
A discipline at the intersection of social research and software engineering. Opcit designs and builds custom automated workflows for academic and applied research — pipelines that ingest large bodies of literature or qualitative data, structure it, interrogate it against rigorous analytic protocols, and produce transparent, citation-anchored outputs with full audit trails. The work is research infrastructure: methods rendered as code, reproducible by design, engineered to a standard that survives peer review and commissioner scrutiny.
Rapid PRISMA-aligned evidence reviews: violence against women and girls (online harm) & child sexual abuse and exploitation — College of Policing. Two systematic evidence reviews delivered through a custom Python pipeline of our own design. The workflow ingests a screened corpus of academic literature, structures it against a fixed analytic protocol, and produces thematic syntheses with every claim traceable to its source.
Reflexive AI: tracing code lineage and downstream harms in open-source AI — research developed in partnership with the Oxford Internet Institute (Prof. Bernie Hogan). A custom scrape and analysis of 1,033 open-source AI repositories and around 200,000 files, using bespoke tooling engineered for the study. The work develops “TraceSeed”, a proposed voluntary telemetry framework for reflexive AI governance — accountability designed in at the point of authorship rather than retrofitted after harm.
Workflow engineering as a service — for universities, research institutes, evaluators and policy bodies commissioning evidence reviews, scoping studies or large-scale qualitative analysis. Opcit designs, builds and documents the pipeline; the client retains the methodology and the code. Available as a standalone capability or embedded within a wider research commission.
Violence and Extremism
Reintegration and rehabilitation of returning foreign fighters — UN Office of Counter-Terrorism. Research and strategic communications development.
Impacts and risks for women and girls exposed to Boko Haram — Research on the gendered dimensions of insurgency in the Lake Chad Basin.
Evaluation of the OCTS Prevent anti-radicalisation programme — Home Office. Evaluation of a national counter-extremism programme.
See also the College of Policing rapid PRISMA review on child sexual abuse and exploitation under Workflow Engineering for Research.
Social Care
Children’s Social Care Innovation Fund (£20m) — Department for Education. Evaluation coordination across a national fund supporting innovation in children’s services.
National evaluation of the Pause programme — Department for Education. Experimental matched-control evaluation of an innovative programme to reduce the number of children taken into care from highly vulnerable mothers.
Extended childcare for children with disabilities and SEN — West London local authority. Consultation, pilot development and evaluation of a wraparound childcare scheme.
Refugee and asylum-seeker children’s home–school liaison project — London-based charity. Two-year evaluation with recommendations for future delivery.
Welcome: Working for Refugee Integration — UNHCR Italy. Ongoing. Evaluation of a labour integration and social protection programme for refugees in Italy.
Refugee Employment Platform — multi-country feasibility assessment — UNHCR and IFC. Ongoing. Feasibility assessment of a private-sector solution to refugee labour market access, covering Türkiye, Armenia, Bulgaria, Spain and a Europe-wide employer component.
Politics and Representation
Women in decision-making: the role of new media for political participation — European Parliament.
Gender balance in the media sector — European Parliament.
See also Gender and Women’s Rights.
Civil Society
Long Term Impact of The National Lottery Community Fund — National Lottery Community Fund. Population-scale research with grant holders, yielding circa 3,000 survey responses alongside qualitative and administrative data analysis.
UNHCR COVID-19 Emergency Support Package: Sahel G5 region — UNHCR. Evaluation across livelihoods, health, nutrition, social protection and WASH.
Research, Evaluation and Monitoring
Leadership Qualities Framework 360° review tool — NHS Institute of Innovation and Improvement. Review and development of a leadership assessment tool, including a national e-survey, focus groups and case studies with senior NHS leaders.
Alcohol Arrest Referral national pilot evaluation — Home Office. Quasi-experimental evaluation with formative and process components across multiple pilot sites.
National focus groups on media and public perceptions of mental health — SHIFT, Department of Health. Exploratory research across nine English regions.
Evaluation of a project to reduce domestic violence and improve agency responses — Department for Education
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