Common Ground Solutions is a Cairo-based consulting firm working across economic and social development in Egypt: designing programmes, strengthening the organisations that run them, managing delivery, and evaluating what they achieved. Research, monitoring and evaluation is our largest practice. It was founded in 2023 by practitioners who had already spent more than a decade running development programmes here.
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thematic sectors worked in, from child protection to agriculture
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research and evaluation methods applied across the portfolio
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fieldwork and reporting delivered in Arabic and English
The people behind CGS had been working across Egypt and the wider region for more than a decade before the firm existed, designing programmes, running fieldwork and evaluating what happened afterwards. In 2023 that practice was formalised into a company. CGS is young as a firm; the experience it runs on is not.
We work across the programme cycle: designing interventions, developing the capacity of the organisations that deliver them, managing delivery and events, and producing the evidence to judge what changed. Research, monitoring and evaluation is the largest of those practices and where most of our published work sits, but it is one unit of a consulting firm, not the whole of it. Our clients are bilateral donors, UN agencies, international NGOs and national foundations. See the six services in detail.
Findings are reported with the evidence that supports them, including where that evidence is thin. Where a study cannot answer a question with the data available, we say so. Independence of finding is not something a client buys or waives, and it is the reason the work is worth commissioning at all.
Our partners have designed and run programmes, not only assessed them. That changes what a study asks and how it ends. Recommendations are written against what a programme team can actually do next quarter, with the staff, budget and permissions it already has. An evaluation that closes on a finding nobody can act on has not finished its job.
Assignments move. A governorate becomes inaccessible, a sample proves unreachable, a donor brings a deadline forward. We redesign around the change rather than delivering against a plan that no longer fits, and we put the revised design and what it costs in time in writing before it reaches the timeline.
Instruments, cleaned datasets, codebooks and training materials stay with the client, documented well enough to be reused. Findings are talked through with the programme team, not only submitted. The report is the record of the work; it is rarely the most useful thing we leave behind.
7 of our 15 clients have commissioned CGS more than once, and 33 of 44 published assignments came from an organisation that had already worked with us. Repeat commissioning is the measure we watch, because it is the one the client controls.
Quantitative measurement and qualitative enquiry are combined where the evaluation question calls for both, so that numbers carry context and findings can be acted on rather than only reported.
Where a commissioner requires them, evaluations are structured around the OECD/DAC criteria of relevance, coherence, efficiency, effectiveness, impact and sustainability, with gender equality and protection carried through rather than appended.
Beneficiary voices, community validation and stakeholder co-creation are part of the method from the inception stage, not a consultation added once the findings are already written.
Only what the study needs is collected. For sensitive populations, including refugees, children and survivors of violence, we apply GDPR-aligned impact assessment protocols, controlled access, encryption and limited retention.
Learning frameworks connect real-time insight to programme decisions while there is still time to change something, and leave knowledge behind that outlasts the assignment.
Collection is run by enumerators trained on the instrument they will use, supervised during fieldwork rather than checked after it, across both Delta and Upper Egypt.
Methodology carries an assignment only so far. These are the five areas where CGS has built enough depth to argue with a client about what the evidence means. Each is delivered through the same six services, and the assignment record shows where.
Managing Partner
Angham leads project coordination, research management and stakeholder engagement at CGS. She is responsible for how assignments are planned, documented and communicated, and for keeping delivery aligned across project teams, partners and clients.
Partner, Economic and Social Development
Mohamed is an economic and social development consultant with more than fifteen years in women's economic empowerment, digital inclusion, labour market systems and access to finance. He leads business development, technical assistance and donor-funded programme design, and brings experience in monitoring and learning, financial ecosystem mapping, private sector engagement and capacity building.
Partner, Monitoring, Evaluation, Research and Learning
Amr is a MEAL and evaluation specialist with more than eleven years in results-based programming, learning systems and donor-funded development projects. His work spans social development, livelihoods, education and institutional performance, with particular depth in evaluation design, data systems and reporting.
Programme Delivery Director
Nadia runs programme operations and implementation, covering coordination, documentation, communication and day-to-day delivery. She is the point at which an assignment plan becomes fieldwork that is organised, responsive and answerable to partners and communities.
Behind the partners is a multidisciplinary core of social scientists, economists, gender specialists, data analysts and field researchers, extended by a trained enumerator network across the governorates where we work.
Every organisation below has commissioned work that is published on this site, grouped by the kind of institution it is.
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