- US VIRGIN ISLANDS · CARIBBEAN REGIONAL PRACTICE
Caribbean-based monitoring, evaluation, and program design for the organizations building resilience across the region.
Edessa Research Consultants is a woman-owned research and evaluation firm based in the US Virgin Islands. We deliver rigorous, right-fit evidence to the UN agencies, regional bodies, donors, and NGOs working to strengthen Caribbean communities.
The Caribbean has no shortage of programs. It has a shortage of people on the ground who can prove those programs work.
Most evaluation and program design for this region still gets done by firms parachuting in from Washington or London. They know the proposal frameworks. They do not know the contexts, the communities, or what it takes to gather credible evidence after a disaster strikes. We are based here, we live here, and we bring the same methodological rigor those firms claim, with the regional knowledge and connections they cannot.
Edessa is led by Kristen Check, a monitoring and evaluation specialist with 17 years of experience in program design, results framework development, and impact research across 34 countries in Sub-Saharan Africa, Latin America, and the Caribbean.
She holds a Post-Graduate Certificate in Public Health from the London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine and a Master of Arts in Cultural Anthropology from the University of South Carolina, and is a QuIP-certified Lead Evaluator (University of Bath) and a Certified Practitioner with Feedback Labs. Her field research on community water management and household resilience has been published in peer-reviewed journals including the Journal of Water, Sanitation and Hygiene for Development.
She relocated to the US Virgin Islands in 2024 and built Edessa into an embedded Caribbean practice, on the conviction that the region deserves evaluation capacity that lives here, not visits.
Kristen Check
— LED BY
PRINCIPAL & FOUNDER
Evidence for the sectors that matter
most to Caribbean resilience
From theory of change through final evaluation, we bring right-fit methods to the work of strengthening communities across the region.
Disaster Risk Reduction & Climate Resilience
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Evaluating preparedness, response, and recovery in a region that lives with hurricane season.
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Measuring how schools and learning systems withstand and recover from disruption.
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Rigorous, ethical research centering the wellbeing of children and young people.
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Published field expertise in community water management and health outcomes.
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Participatory approaches that surface community voice and programmatic learning.
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Public-health-grounded measurement of access, quality, and impact.
