Gwen Heaner, PhD
Founder and Managing Director; Lead Consultant for West Africa Projects
Gwen has over 20 years of experience in applied qualitative and quantitative social research and impact evaluation across six continents. Her research and its real-world impact is vast: it has contributed to mediation of conflicts between local communities and extractive corporate industries, it has helped governments and non-governmental improve education offerings for out-of-school youth to find employment, it has shown the private sector people’s willingness to pay for electricity in their urban development projects, and it has enhanced critical information uptake and behavior change across cultural contexts. Skilled in managing multiple complex projects simultaneously, she excels at leading cross-functional teams with diverse expertise. She can customize and communicate results and recommendations to any audience.
In 2012, Gwen independently founded GK Consulting LLC, providing research and impact evaluation services to 20+ international organizations and companies across six continents, with individual contracts up to USD 200,000 and totaling more than USD 1.5 million. She has developed proposals, designed, staffed, and managed more than fifteen evaluations (including randomized controlled trials, quasi-experiments, and observational studies), designed and led the qualitative component for more than twenty mixed-methods studies, and managed two large-scale multi-country longitudinal qualitative research studies.
In addition to managing GK Consulting, Gwen is a regular independent research consultant for the World Bank, and since 2014 has worked part-time with Education Development Center as a Senior Research Associate, leading multiple Monitoring, Evaluation, and Learning tasks for a variety of global and country-level USAID projects.
Extended Consultant Database
We have an impressive database of local and international consultants from around the world with skills to meet clients’ specific needs. Our consultants are based in Asia, Africa, Latin America, the US and Europe with language skills in (among others) English (primary), Spanish, Portuguese, French, Swahili, Chinese, Russian, German, Italian, Urdu, Hindi, Arabic and a variety of local dialects.
We can provide consultants of varying experience, depending on client needs, at competitive rates based on their skills. We have PhD-holders with over 20 years’ experience and JDs with over 10 years of experience; we have medical doctors with experience in public health in developing countries; we have life-long consultants who have worked in over forty countries; we have recent PhD graduates with up to 5 years of consulting experience and MA and PhD students who are anxious to get dirty in the field. All of our consultants share a passion for theoretically-grounded yet practical and results-driven social research.