Development Studies Editing and Proofreading Services

A programme reaches forty thousand households and the evaluation reports improved outcomes among them. The households that could not reach the registration point, could not produce the documents, were not on the list the enumerators worked from, or were away doing seasonal work are not in the figure. They are frequently the households the programme existed to reach, and their absence looks exactly like success.

We edit what development researchers and practitioners write — impact evaluations and their design sections, political economy and context analyses, participatory and qualitative fieldwork, programme and donor reporting, theory of change documents, work on aid effectiveness and conditionality, gender and inclusion analyses, ethics and safeguarding documentation, and theses, working papers and policy briefs. Our editors work on who is in the evidence and who is not.

Development writing lives or dies on the question of who benefits, and the failure is an average effect reported without the distribution or the missing. A programme that raises a mean can leave the poorest untouched or worse off. We work through these so the beneficiary group is described as it actually formed rather than as designed, including who selected in, who was excluded and by what mechanism; so effects are disaggregated along the dimensions that matter in this setting — wealth quintile, gender, disability, land tenure, ethnicity, distance from the road — since an average conceals a transfer between groups; so those absent from the data are named and their likely direction of difference stated, because non-random attrition and non-coverage bias almost always run towards the disadvantaged; so the counterfactual is described as a real situation rather than a statistical device; so the local political economy that will determine whether a finding travels is on the page; so the voices of participants are quoted in a way that does not flatten them into illustration; and so the paper says who bears the cost of the intervention, not only who gains. Writing like this is trusted by the people who have to implement it.

Everything you send is treated in confidence, including unpublished evaluations, fieldwork material and donor reporting. We are editors rather than development economists or practitioners, and we offer no view on programmes, findings or policy. What we can do is keep the missing households visible.